Facebook has hired the team behind Gowalla, the location service that lets people share where they are using their mobile phones.

Facebook has hired the team at Gowalla, a mobile location service in Austin, Texas, but the service will be shut down by January, the companies said Monday.

First there was location-based social network Foursquare. Then Gowalla and other sites followed suit and launched. And now with news that Facebook is slowly rolling out its own location-based technology, you can expect to hear a lot-both true and false-about what these services really are.

Facebook announced yesterday its much-anticipated location-based service, Places. Places, which is currently available only on mobile devices that support HTML 5 and with a GPS or geolocation feature, is set to pose a threat to other more-established services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown and Whrrl.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today announced the company's latest creation, a foray into the world of location-based services called Facebook Places.