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Mashable reports this morning that FourSquare has had a record number of sign-ups in the wake of the Facebook Places launch, a launch that some suggested could mark the death of services like FourSquare (I know I was going to avoid those death sentences, but you know, sometimes it’s appropriate. See Death Becomes You).

The interesting thing is that FourSquare was not actually threatened by the Facebook Places launch, at least their CEO wasn’t letting on if they were. In an interview with the LA Times, FourSquare CEO Dennis Crowley had this to say about Facebook’s entry into the market:

“That’s the thing. Everyone keeps saying, “Oh my God, you guys must be so stressed with Facebook getting into this.” Not really. We spend a lot of our time telling people why location is important and why people want to check in. Facebook now gets to do that for us. We can focus on the stuff we want to do.”

So in their view, if Facebook is getting involved that will mainstream geo-location and be good for them. You might see that as putting a happy face on a bad situation, but it turns out that’s exactly what happened, at least for the short-term.

Instead of competition swallowing up the smaller stand-alone services, it boosted them via the positive pull of competition. Suddenly everyone was aware of geo-location instead of just a few people. Seems rumors of FourSquare and Gowalla’s deaths could have been greatly exaggerated after all.

Cross-posted on ‘by Ron Miller.’

Facebook is expected to join the geo-location game today, at least according to many published reports including this one from Kara Swisher on the All Things Digital Blog. Swisher and just about everyone else I’ve seen write about this subject believes it should effectively mark the beginning of the end for established geo-location services like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Conventional thinking goes if Facebook is doing it, it will basically muscle out any competition and it makes sense, right? Facebook is big and has hundreds of millions of users, so why not use the Facebook tool if it’s there. But conventional wisdom doesn’t always hold.

The same could be said for Google‘s foray into social media, which so far has not been a dazzling success or how about Microsoft‘s adventures in mobile where the market share numbers seem to be rolling backward instead of forward.

Every time an established player makes a play for a piece of an existing service, it doesn’t guarantee they will do it well or that people won’t simply prefer the established services over the new offering. It may come to pass that Facebook annihilates Foursquare and Gowalla and they both go away or get absorbed by other larger services like Facebook, but just because Facebook gets into the game doesn’t make them the automatic winner, not by a long shot.

Cross-posted on ‘by Ron Miller’ Blog.