Popular social networking site Facebook Wednesday launched its new location-sharing feature – Facebook Places, which will essentially allow Facebook users to signal, to their friends, their presence at a bar, restaurant, arena, or other such locations. For pinpointing the locations in “Places,” Facebook will be using Microsoft’s Bing Maps.

Facebook’s new geolocation and “check-in” service, which is fairly akin to other location-based services like Gowalla and MyTown, is an interesting addition to the social network; and will greatly enhance the already-growing popularity of the location sharing.

To check into a location using Facebook Places, which will initially be rolled out to US users only, users can use either of the two options available: via the Facebook iPhone application or by pointing their mobile browser to touch.facebook.com. It should be noted that the browser-based “check in” option will work only if the users’ device supports HTML5 and geolocation.

For checking in, the Facebook users need to simply tap the ‘Places’ icon, and select a location from a list of nearby Places. The users can also tag any friends who are with them, and add a status update.

Elaborating that users can also see who else is at their location under the “People Here Now” section for that particular place, Facebook said that all the ‘Places’ check-ins will be visible only to friends by default unless the users set their master privacy control to “Everyone.”