There has been widespread coverage in the press and on blogs and Twitter over the past week regarding the launch of Facebook Places. In response to the growing trend in location services, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, Facebook has now entered the fray and is offering a new service to their millions of users (although initially this is just working in the US).

This article from Advertising Age gives a good summary of the new service and how this can be used as a potential marketing tool. However, as always happens with Facebook services, there are also considerable concerns about the privacy settings with the new Places tool, and how friends can also log your location, without your knowledge - as described in this second piece.

The new Facebook Places services certainly adds another resource to the options available from the social networking site, but how it will be used by users and the benefits to marketers remains unclear at the moment.