With this week's launch of Facebook Places (it's toe-in-the-water offering in the thriving location based services market) many people are predicting the imminent demise of services like Foursquare, Gowalla etc.

They are predicting this because of the fact that Facebook have over half a billion users.

Sure that's an impressive number but this is more than simply a numbers game. The whole market for location based services is changing in front of our eyes - it's a wild west - the solution/offering is not by any means stable.

This means that services such as Foursquare (which are solely focused on this particular niche rather than the bigger social networking picture) will be able to be more fleet of foot than behemoths such as Facebook. In short, Facebook will be playing catchup.

Furthermore I don't think this is a winner-takes all scenario. After all, we have many reward cards in our wallets - perhaps there will always be multiple rewards systems and we shall choose to engage with these systems via the location based services of our choice - whether that be Foursquare, Facebook or Gowalla.

It'll be very interesting to see what the next 12 months brings to the LBS market.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device