So I have been thinking about this Facebook Places feature on Facebook. This thing is about to get my friends and family doing what I have been doing for months now on Foursquare. What is this I talk about?

I’m talking about a social app that let’s you check in and geo locate your position using GPS or cellular triangulation on the IPhone or Android.

Although many people use these types of services like Gowalla and Foursquare Facebook is playing the all too successful wait and copy game.

We saw the wait and copy happen with TiVo when Dish and Direct TV network and cable TV basically stole the idea but made it much better with what everybody now knows to be DVR.

So Facebook Places vrs Foursquare and Gowalla, who will win?

We all know Facebook Places will skyrocket past Foursquare literally overnight even though Foursquare is huge itself.

An interesting development may be the need for Foursquare to have to become a more broad social network like Facebook to compete.

Also it is rumored that Gowalla partnered with Facebook on their Facebook Places. With no mention of a “powered by Gowalla” anywhere it would seem that Facebook may have eaten Gowalla for lunch and spit out the bones.

I for one am looking forward to more Facebook friends and family geo tagging their favorite places. I will be more likely to go somewhere upon hearing about via a Places status update from a friend.

This my friends is going to be huge. Basically no restaurants and bars in
my small town of Tyler Texas have encouraged people to login to Foursquare and post their review of the food and simply that they ate there.

This will all soon be changing and Facebook will now be much
more about what we have been trying to do with local Tyler business already through our reviews and posts submitted on Facebook. Now however it won’t just be me and a few other people but thousands of Tylerites.

Facebook Places has officially gone live although I can only see it on the IPhone app after deleting the app and re-adding it. Once the IPhone Facebook application was reinstalled I was able to see the “Places” feature.

It is not working here in Tyler Texas yet and has a message that it will soon be rolled out in our area.

Facebook is trying to do it in phases to not overload the system.

I can no longer see the need of Foursquare when this goes live? Am I missing something that Foursquare will do for me to make me want to log in to two different check in apps?

An interesting note is that Facebook Places currently has made their logo a square with the number 4 in it? Wow!!, What a blatant rip off of the Foursquare brand? I thought Facebook was a big enough company to not stoop so low to do something like this.

Facebook Places has basically made something way better than Foursquare, effectively body slamming them on the ground and has then stomped on their face while they have them down with the whole logo rip-off.