When Facebook last week announced the introduction of its new location-based service, Places, a number of tech pundits declared location-based startup Foursquare a dead app walking.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, however, made a point to bring Holger Luedorf, Foursquare's vice president of mobile products, and Gowalla chief technical officer Scott Raymond out on stage to introduce their API partnership with Facebook—a gesture that many onlookers viewed as half-hearted.

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has subsequently played around with Places, and isn't holding back when it comes to his opinions about the service.

"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 telling their friends where they are," Crowley said during a recent interview with The Telegraph.

Crowley went on to tell the paper that any interest in the feature will more or less revolve around the fact that it is a Facebook product. "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."

The existence of Facebook Places—and the press event that introduced it to the world—has, in fact, helped bolster the company's profile. Foursquare reported record signups late last week.