It’s been a week and a half now since Facebook tacked Deals functionality onto Facebook Places, finally giving the location-based service that everyone’s loved to hate a legitimate commercial reason to exist. Big deal, you might think; Facebook Places’ poor adoption rate and generally lousy public image (it’s dodgy enough to tell Foursquare where I am – why would I want to tell all my Facebook friends?) have made reception to the service lukewarm at best.

But then how do you explain the completely viral success of Gap’s “free jeans” check-in promotion, which didn’t receive a word of publicity on Gap.com but, on the word-of-mouth generated by Facebook alone, left shelves empty within minutes of opening? “The free jeans were long gone … with lines stretching out the door since before the store opened at 8 a.m.,” writes a reporter for Fast Company, asking whether the move did more harm than good after leaving angry shoppers with nothing in their hands except their checked-in mobile phones.

Regardless of the tone of the PR generated by Gap’s campaign, the fact remains that folks checked in, and they did so in droves, even the skeptics. “Anti-Social Media” blogger Jay Dolan, who’s been hating on Facebook and location-based services in general for, well, ever, posted a confession that probably isn’t an isolated one: “Let me be clear: I hate Facebook, and I hate checking into places. But if I know checking in will save me a few bucks, I will totally go for it because it provides me value … I planned the rest of my shopping trip around Facebook’s little golden tickets.”

Sitting here at my desk at The World Company, I can fire up Facebook on my iPhone and find three such golden tickets within location range (it would have been four, had the Gap’s special lasted for longer); one is from the Journal-World, but the other two – from Starbucks and American Eagle Outfitters – are for national chains. And that brings up an important question: Where’s the intial adoption of Facebook Deals going to come from? If it’s all nationals like Starbucks, that’s great for big shopping centers or strip-mall cities. In a town with as much indie pride as Lawrence, it might not bode so well – even though there’s no barrier to entry that keeps locals from setting up Facebook deals too. Once you’ve got over the initial hurdle of claiming your place, in fact, creating a deal is just as simple as loading up a special on Foursquare.

Plus, there’s the free-publicity aspect that comes with users sharing Facebook deals. Of course, your friends on Foursquare or Gowalla can see where you’ve been and, if they feel inclined, click through to check out those places’ specials – but that’s working within the services’ limited user base, especially compared to the Facebook juggernaut. Plus, that’s a much more passive advertisement of your store’s deal; Facebook pushes news of a deal claim out to the user’s wall (assuming they haven’t messed with the default preferences), which opens the possibility of reaching a vast number of people within an interface they already understand and use. If you’re a business, which service are you going to use? Put that way, it sounds like a rhetorical question.

So is this the death knell for Foursquare and other independent location-based apps? It’s hard to say; if nothing else, Facebook is going to have a fair amount of bad press to work through before adoption becomes truly smooth. But face it: in the thick of holiday shopping season, wouldn’t you be tempted to fire up Facebook Places to see if you could put an extra gift or two in someone’s stocking?

Thoughts? Issues? As always, let us know in the comments below.