ReadWriteWeb

We all know that small businesses should create their own Facebook Pages to help customers find them and engage with them online. Now there is a great set of guidelines from MenuPlatform that is specific to restaurant owners. It is well worth your time to take a closer look, even if you aren't concerned with this particular type of business.

If you use Foursquare and Facebook Places to notify your followers where you are, you might be interested in a new iOS app called Checkin+, from Shape Services, the same folks that created IM+, a multiple IM client app. If you are tired of tapping when checking in, this is the app for you.

Keeping up with every tech headline is hard enough for anybody, let alone busy professionals. To help, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the week's most important tech news and insights for small- and medium-sized businesses.

Facebook has begun to roll out some of the features available with Facebook Places for owners of Pages, according to a post on Inside Facebook. Some business Pages that have a physical address listed are being given the ability to offer deals to customers and let them check-in to the location, just as business owners can with Facbeook Places set up.

Gowalla has released an ambitious update to its iPhone app today that does more than just offer well-designed pins or virtual items. Gowalla 3.0 comes to the iPhone with a brand new design, a number of new features and something Gowalla users are likely to find far more useful than any digital mocha - integration with Facebook Places and Foursquare, Gowalla's much larger rivals in the location-based check-in sphere.

This week, Facebook unveiled a number of updates to its mobile platform, including the launch of a location-based coupons and discounts offering called Facebook Deals, a more open read/write location API, single sign-on support for mobile and revamped iPhone and Android applications.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't give specific numbers on how many people were using Facebook Places as compared with its competition like Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR and others. So you tell us: are using it as a consumer? Or if you're a developer, what your plans are to integrate it into your app?

Editor's note: We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

With yesterday's announcement of Facebook read/write APIs into Places, it seems to be a good time to reflect on a) location aggregation, b) finding your lost grandmother, and c) lazy user interaction design.

Facebook announced today at its mobile platform event that it is opening up its Places API. That means that any outside application can now post check-ins, photos, links and more to the Facebook Places database. It also means that any outside app can read the same info from the Facebook database to incorporate into its app.

In other words, Facebook Places has positioned itself as the central hub for all check-in apps. That news, and the launch of Facebook Places Deals, could help check-ins scale up fast enough to support more meaningful and sustainable innovation than the small and scattered group of check-in apps has to date.

Facebook appears set to launch a social check-in Deals feature, according to an email forwarded by a participating retailer to Facebook watch-dog blog All Facebook tonight.

The email says that this particular deal will give Facebook users a free item when they tag three of their friends as present at the retailer's location. Facebook plus Groupon? Considering how much profile and social data a Facebook Places check-in can carry as a payload, this sounds a whole lot more valuable to retailers than a Groupon deal. This is very different than the kind of Places-powered hyperlocal advertising that most observers were expecting to monetize the Places feature.

Over the past few months, Facebook has come out with what two great features - Places and redesigned Groups. The only problem, however, is Places really only appears on the iPhone app and mobile website, while Groups can only be accessed from the full, non-mobile site. The two features, however, would work together perfectly, hence, Mappr.

Mappr brings two of Facebook's best recent additions together, allowing you to check-in without sharing it with everyone on Facebook - exactly what groups were made for.

Keeping up with all of the important technology news in a given week is a challenge for anyone, let alone busy professionals and people trying to run businesses.

While there's not yet a known cure, ReadWriteBiz can help alleviate your information overload by bringing you a rundown of some of the most important tech news and product reviews for small to medium-sized businesses.