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He said: “I have now had a chance to play around with Facebook Places and it’s not that great or interesting. It’s a pretty boring service, with barely any incentives for users to keep coming back and to tell their friends where they are.

“The only interesting thing about Places is that it has a potential audience of over 500 million people around the world… but that can only be a good thing for location-based services, like Foursquare, as Facebook will educate the masses about check-ins.”

Facebook declined to comment.

At the end of last week Facebook launched Places in the US.The new tool lets users share their location in a very similar fashion to popular location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla. People’s friends on the site can see if their friends are near them at any time, if they have chosen to check-into their current location.

US Facebook users need to update their iPhone Facebook app, or visit touch.facebook.com, to get access to the tool. A user then needs to select ‘Places’, tap the ‘Check-In’ button, and then a list of nearby places will come up on the screen. Facebook members then can choose the place which matches their location, and if its not on the list, they can search for it or add it.

Once ‘checked in’, the activity will be posted in a user’s news feed and come up in the ‘Recent Activity’ section on the specific location’s page.

Crowley believes that Foursqaure’s gaming mechanics, such as the prospect of a user becoming the ‘mayor’ of a location they have visited the most frequently, will keep people far more enticed into using his service over the likes of Places. He has also firmly rebuffed the notion that Facebook’s new tool will blow Foursquare out of the water.

“I always knew Facebook would launch a check-in tool. I knew that on the day we started creating Foursquare. But I also knew that people needed incentives to keep checking-in and sharing their location. Facebook could copy our games ideas, but we are working on a raft of new mechanics which we hope will keep Foursquare fresh and ‘check-in fatigue’ away.” He declined to divulge any details of new features in the pipeline out of fear of rivals copying the plans afoot.

Crowley also offered a glimpse of his vision of Foursquare’s long-term future. “In the future, I want Foursquare to be able to tell people where to go wherever they are in the world, based on their previous visiting habits, likes and dislikes and the time of day…We want to be able to push venue suggestions to you. That’s what I am pushing towards as we develop Foursquare’s tools and how we use our data,” he explained.

Facebook has said it is working with the likes Foursquare and Yelp, to develop Places. Crowley said that Places’s open API means that people checking in on Foursquare will be able to push this information through to the Places feed and vice versa. However, Foursquare have yet to turn this capability on – but will do within “the next two weeks”. And Crowley confirmed this would not be a commercial arrangement.

Crowley said he had no regrets about not being acquired by Facebook, having “had conversations” about it in the past, as he was not ready to let go of the business.

He did admit though that Facebook’s head start with more than 500 million members, versus Foursquare’s near three million registered users, was a “little scary”.

The location-based social network signed up it two millionth member in July, three months after acquiring its first million users.