Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg may have infamously given up his iPhone recently for an Android handset, but that doesn’t mean that his company has abandoned Apple’s iOS. Following a press conference Wednesday to introduce the new location-based Places feature, an iPhone app update hit which adds the feature.

Facebook has now added the ability for users to “check in” to their current location right from the iPhone app, which will let you see who else is at your location as well as tag friends who are with you. Places will ultimately allow businesses to “claim” their own locations and offer discounts or promotions to users, according to AppleInsider.

If that functionality sounds familiar, that’s because it’s already been made popular by startups such as Gowalla, Foursquare and Yelp -- but rather than competing with the existing services, Facebook has partnered with them to allow badges and check-ins from the third-party services to carry over to and from Facebook.

Debuting first on the iPhone app with the just-released 3.2 update, Facebook Places is also available from the mobile website at touch.facebook.com and the company is planning to offer the feature on other smartphone apps in the future.

The Places feature is being slowly rolled out, so you may see a message that “This feature will be available in your region soon” as we did here in both the Midwest as well as MacLife.com’s home turf in San Francisco. No need for apocalyptic panic, the feature should light up in a day or two.

Facebook for iPhone 3.2 isn’t all about Places -- you can now set the privacy of individual status updates, see all recipients of inbox messages and iOS 4 users can now upload photos and video in the background. The app also squashes some bugs, most notably a delay when commenting on a post or posting a status update as well as issues that cropped up with Notes and the News Feed.

Perplexingly, Facebook is still not a universal app, nor is there a separate version available for the iPad, which seems to be crying out for it (although the app does run on the iPad, but it’s a confining experience).

Facebook 3.2 requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later and the free 3.2MB download is available on the App Store right now.

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