Google is preparing to battle with another social networking service, Foursquare, which is currently the most popular Geo-location based social network after confirming the many reports it is going to integrate check-in offers for businesses on Google+.

Revealed By Mistake, Eventually Confirmed

The first one to reveal it was the blogger Mike Blumental where few days ago he discovered in Google Places help documents (Google already took them offline) a section suggesting business owners to use check-in offers to allure customers:

“You can request that they (the customers) check-in on Google+ in order to redeem your offers… When you create new offers, you can choose whether to allow a check-in during redemption.”

After so many reports across the web and even screenshots of businesses check-in offers form were leaked (see at the bottom), Google has finally confirmed to VentureBeat that they mistakenly released the check-in help documents and that next week Google+ will enable check-in offers for businesses on Google+:

“Please stay tuned for roll out of this feature for merchants, which we’re targeting for next week.”

The only questions that remained open are how is Google going to combine the 3 services (Google+, Offers and Check-in) all together efficiently and would it constitute as a worth competitor to Foursquare which at the moment is the leading (pure) location-based social networking service.

Foursquare Is Already At 15 Million Users

Couple of days ago, Foursquare has disclosed few interesting and impressive stats to Clickz News: The company has reached to 15 million users, 3 times more than last year! About half of the users comes from the U.S. and the other half comes from other countries across the globe.

Last weekend, after Gowalla has been acquired by Facebook and officially announced it will be completely gone in January, it seemed that Foursquare will continue its fast growth in 2012, but now it looks like it is going to have a fierce, well financed competitor…