Facebook Unveils a Service to Announce Where Users Are

Facebook introduced a long-anticipated service called Places on Wednesday that could help the company tap local and small-business advertisers and sharpen its competition with Google.

Facebook’s Places borrows heavily from location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, which allow users to check in at places and broadcast their location to friends. But those companies, as well as others like Yelp, said they saw Facebook’s Places as a complement to their own services and as an opportunity to gain additional distribution.

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