Facebook Places icon looks like a "Foursquare" symbol -- what's the real story?

If you've been testing out Facebook Places, you may have noticed that the Places icon looks like the number four ... in a square. Is this a blatant glove-slap at Places rival/partner Foursquare? Is Foursquare so synonymous with location-based check-in services that Facebook decided it would best represent the Places services?

It's a lot more innocent than that, according to the artist behind the icon, Aaron Sittig. He answered a question about the icon on q&a site Quora. Sittig says there was no intent to refer to Foursquare at all.

Originally we had two straight roads crossing each other, but the icon looked too much like a package with ribbon around it. We tried adding water at one edge of the icon but this complicated the map and distracted from the Place droplet shape. Our solution was to add a bend in one of the roads.

I recall some jokes about the roads looking like the Facebook 'f' rotated 90 degrees, but no one noticed that the roads formed the number 4. We sure got a laugh from the news stories, but could only wish we'd been so clever.

So, there you have it. The Places icon wasn't a sneaky business move, and it doesn't mean Facebook is buying Foursquare, or anything like that. It was just an artist's solution to a design problem.

Tags: design, facebook places, FacebookPlaces, foursquare, icon, location-based, logo