This analysis by Gigaom is interesting to me. I’m really keen to see what Facebook does with places. What they’ve done so far has been underwhelming technically, but has seen impressive takeup.

For example - try searching for Hashigo Zake (a Wellington beer bar popular with early adopters / geeks) on various services:

Facebook has such massive uptake, that whatever it does has an impact. The understanding, technology and devices behind ‘location based’ services are so widespread that it’s really a case of Facebook just providing the tools and they’ll probably dominate existing location based services.

Also - note that all of the sites have reasonably terse (or even descriptive) URLs. All except Google. They really don’t get clean URLs.