I really quite enjoy using Foursquare. It’s still a pleasant little social networking site (at least in the UK), where the LOLers and bad spellers are yet to show up and I’m mostly friends with people that I’m, well, actually friends with.

So I’m looking forward to these new features that Foursquare is rolling out, as soon as I’ve updated the app on my iPhone (Android and Blackberry sers will have to wait a tiny bit longer).

Most useful, it seems on first inspection, is that newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, as well as Time Out Chicago and New York and the famous restaurant guide Zagats are all adding a button. OK, not so useful for us based in the UK, but it WILL be when it gets here.

So, you read a review of a restaurant, you think it sounds brilliant, you click a button and it is added to a To-Do list on Foursquare. And the next time you’re trying to decide where to eat, there it is.

To-Do places will aslo pop up in lists of nearby locations with a sort of dog-ear bookmark, so if you’ve added a place (either manually or through the new button function), you’ll be reminded that it’s nearby and that you wanted to go there.

Foursquare has also added a slight competitive edge by letting you see how many people have taken your advice when you’ve kind offered a tip on a destination – you know the kind of thing, “order the croque monsieur, it’s the best I’ve had outside of France”.

No doubt these features have long been planned by Foursquare, but it comes as Facebook Places is rolled out worldwide. Obviously features such as sharing restaurant reviews with friends via Facebook are as old as, well, a couple of years. But I think the new Foursquare functions are neat, nice and useful and might well stop existing users from switching over, if they were thinking about it.