This week Foursquare launched number of new features, the same time Facebook announced it would be getting rid of Places, it’s location rival.

Foursquare’s biggest new development was the launch of events, giving users the ability to check in to a specific occasion, such as sports game, film screening or gig, to make sharing experiences all the more personal. Teaming up with ESPN for sports events, MovieTickets.com for films and Songkick for gig listings, the platform will pull in all major events to their databases at over 50,000 venues. Foursquare are also looking into adding a functionality where users can add their own events and also give businesses the ability to personalise and brand events themselves. Obviously this functionality is majorly US orientated at the moment, but these developments give us much more scope for future location initiatives to be rolled out for artists.

Foursquare also implemented a ‘curated lists’ feature that lets users create unlimited tip lists of their favourite places in a city. Obama and The White House also joined Foursquare last week, giving the platform a nice little PR coup.

Finally, Facebook announced on Monday that its on platform answer to Foursquare ‘Places’ would be culled from its mobile application. This move along with the developments outlined above will give Foursquare even more dominance within the location space becoming an increasingly useful service to both brands and citizen users alike.