Facebook Places was launched last year (2010) in August and since then it has become the default check-in utility for many although many users still continue to use Foursquare as their preferred check-in utility. These kind of applications which depend on user input for their day-to-day functioning can never be totally relied upon due to various reasons such as inconsistent spellings, half-correct information, etc.

Facebook Places, too, is plagued with these inconsistencies. In fact whenever I use Place on the Facebook Mobile app to check into a place, I see more than one entry for the same place which differ just in terms of spellings. Facebook has been working really hard in order to make the Places product more useful for us users by means of introducing check-in based deals and other goodies.

Well, in order to get all these inconsistencies fixed related to the name of various places and accompanying information, Facebook crowd sourced the correction job to none other than the Facebook users them selves.

Users can now update information or edit the names of their favorite places listed in Facebook Places using the information editor, which can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=places_editor. There are two ways in which you can help in this crowd sourcing:

1. By adding missing information about a place

2. By reporting a duplicate place

Once you open the editor, you are shown this page which has various options that you need to select before editing the info you want to:

After, this you are shown various places which need attention. You can go ahead and enter the required information or click on Next button to move to the Next place.

There is also a Live Feed at the bottom of th Places Editor which shows who all are editing what, in real time! Overall, we must say - "Very Smart!!!" So what do you think about this new strategy from Facebook? Do let us know in the comments.