Facebook Places is good, but don't be any more reliant on it than Foursquare - they deprecate APIs without warning too. I run a local news site and made heavy use of their Events API (public events indexable by Google and visible without signing in to Facebook available to anyone with a browser even today) until they unceremoniously ripped it away without providing any advance notification, a deprecation warning, or even any reason as to why it's gone.

I still use the Facebook Places API but I have no doubt it too will disappear without any warning.