In these economic times it can be hard to justify spending thousands on airfare, hotels, and party-life travel destinations. So save your money and let geolocation services do the work for you.

If you want to visit an exotic location, then Facebook Places and a few browser tweaks are all you’ll need.

Next Stop: Command Line Central Station

Facebook Places has been a topic of discussion in tech coverage in the wake of the product launch a few weeks ago. As it turns out, you can simply create your own Facebook Places-ready format file to take a quick trip to New York and visit the Statue of Liberty.

Simply do the following:

  1. Open a terminal or text editor and and place the JSON snippet in a file
  2. Open Firefox and browse to about:config
  3. Search for geo.wifi.uri
  4. Replace with the path to the file containing the JSON snippet
  5. Visit http://touch.facebook.com
  6. Select Places (and check in a friend!)

(I posted this from Research Triangle Park, NC at the time)

Where have you visited recently using Facebook Places? Let us know in the comments!

(Hat tips to: the Internet and @courtenaybird for the idea)