One of my favorite hangouts in the Bay Area is a small cafe in Oakland called Actual Cafe. Their focus on bringing people together in real life and leaving the internet behind is a breath of fresh air. This speaks to a notion that Facebook’s head of product Chris Cox brought up in their launch announcement of Facebook Places from a urban sociologist named Ray Oldenberg. Oldenburg is an expert on the relationship between people and public spaces. He theorized that there are three places that matter in our society:

1. Home – the place we wake up, sleep, eat, where you go to digest, and spend time with family.
2. Work – the economic engine of society, where we work our brain and muscles, where we add value to the world.
3. The Third Place – the places we go and share our lives with each other, where random, serendipitous meetings occur (e.g. cafes, restaurants, bars, and libraries).

Oldenberg feared that with the technologies introduced in the 20th century (television, radio, telephone, etc..), the third place was on the verge of becoming extinct. This makes sense, given the tendency television has to keep a person inside of a house for hours at a time as opposed to interacting with other people.

As subscribers to Oldenberg’s theory, Cox and Facebook believe that Facebook Places, and other location-based services like foursquare allow people to use technology to add resurrect the third place from it’s death bed. Gaming mechanics offered by foursquare and others have an unparalleled way of connecting people around their third place, while leveraging intelligent technology to take it to the next level.

Where is this headed?

Maybe you walk into a restaurant, and take a seat. When you put your “iPhone 10″ down it starts to glow. It would begin to tell you what your friends would order at that restaurant, along with what you might drink. All of your friends’ memories are here, from 10 years prior. The physical reality that we’re in comes to live with the human stories that took place there.

“Too many of our human stories are collecting dust on our shelves at home,” Cox said.

Facebook wants to change that, and give those stories a home, where the people you care about can access them. He tells a story about one day, in 20 years, our kids will go to Ocean Beach in San Francisco, and their little device will vibrate and light up, and it will say, “This is where your parents had their first kiss.” The world of location-based services is redefining how people interact on a day-to-day basis. How does this affect the way you interact with your friends and family?