Facebook introduced a mix of changes to the platform today on its official blog.

Among these changes, comes the announcement that the Facebook Places feature will be scrapped.

Facebook Places allowed any Facebook user to announce their presence at any location (through “checking-in”) to all of their friends. For businesses, there was great incentive to create a Places listing and encourage check-ins as they encouraged exposure for their business or brand for virtually no cost.

Imagine this: I have 250+ friends on Facebook and I decide to check-in to Joe’s Electronics with the announcement that they’re having a huge sale as part of my check-in. For Joe’s Electronics, this is pure gold. Free advertising, with my check-in potentially reaching over 250 people. Even if only one of my friends takes action on my check-in, either by Liking Joe’s Electronics’ Facebook Page (or perhaps even going so far as to visit the store and make a purchase) then that’s some great word-of-mouth payoff for Joe’s. And they didn’t even have to do anything.

Now that the Places feature is gone, what will happen to Facebook Deals? The Deals feature, performing strongly in the US, and only just launched in Australia last week, relied heavily upon the Places feature to be effective. Will Facebook rejig the Deals feature so that it still exists within the platform, or has the little-social-network-that-could, Foursquare, completely won the location-based service war?