Places is still a better deal for advertisers and retailers than it is for my friends, and deals is another step in the direction of empowering them (advertisers and retailers).
You can check yourself in anywhere, tag your friends (whether they're there or not), and see where others are checking in. But I want to use Places to meet up with people, to organize events, to see where my friends' favorite places are. It's just not very good for that.
And it still reeks of poor design -- enough people checking in at your house will force it to be a public location, and there is no process to privatize it again.
Facebook, practically by definition, is for the advertisers. Advertisers pay their salaries, after all, and the users are the product that Facebook is selling them.
Certainly. But you wouldn't know it from the language in the Deals announcement, which uses the word "friend" no fewer than 10 times.
We launched Places to let you share where you are with
your friends and see who's nearby. Now with Deals, you
also can see what offers are nearby and share those deals
with your friends.
I hear this very cynical reasoning often but it's simply not true no matter how populist it is. The main difference is that if you're selling a product or a service and people don't want to buy it, you tweak your product until people will like it. Facebook, however, cannot switch its userbase. It can, however, find new advertisers that are a better fit for its users.
It warns you about checking into at private locations. While I agree that they should have the ability to differentiate between public and private places, Facebook does have a pretty big warning about this. If people are checking your house, they are the ones explicitly saying it's a public place.
Facebook is becoming Tecent QQ in US. (If you dont know abt Tecent QQ, please google it). It implements ideas from emerging companies and squeeze them out because they have the most important thing: 500 Million eyeballs.
This seems like a relatively common way most 800lb Gorilla businesses work. Google does the same (Gmail and others).
Facebook is a business which has leverage and they are going to use it. Business is competitive thats the nature of the game. I can't get too pissed at Facebook, because Groupon and Foursquare will do try to squash smaller competitors as well - its the nature of swimming with sharks.
Deals shouldn't be the focus of our discussion. Instead, we should be afraid of the fact that facebook can wield the power of the social graph (which it owns) to create extremely valuable wholly owned subsidiaries. Most startups that rely on the network effect could be better implemented by facebook.
Does that make them a monopoly? If so, is it something we should fight? If the idea of a network-effect based startup benefits from a bigger network, we should all want them to own these ideas then, right?
A while ago I wrote a short piece about how location-based services will be 'hackable' for a long time (the specific piece was about gaming Foursquare with nine lines of Perl). Given how easy it is to game any location checkin service, what incentive will advertisers have when their deals are monopolized by a small group of Perl+wget armed, obsessive compulsive script kiddies? I don't know enough about marketing numbers--presuming that vendors give out deals to bring customers back to their store, do they care if the deals are systematically monopolized by freeloaders or bargain hunters?
During the live broadcast, a Facebook employee asked Mark how Facebook planned to handle people from fake check-ins and fake people tags, and his answer was that you have to show the retailer your phone in order to redeem the reward.
He also laughed at the question while answering it. Classy.
I don't think this is the right direction for Facebook to take. In my opinion, eventually they'll take on 'the America Online of social networks' stigma. This certainly doesn't help. After a certain point I think there will be a real opportunity for a competitor.
The thing about all this check-in deals is that it solves mostly the first problem - customer acquisition. Loyalty deals are great for customer retention, but for that part of the puzzle, I'm wondering why businesses would, and seem to want to, rely on an intermediary to manage the relationships. Allowing Facebook or any other site to be a key part in managing loyalty seems like one step away of losing all customers (or at least the data of them).
Costs and reach. The costs for a single business to implement something like this would be, I imagine, prohibitive. Their is also the issue of reach. Facebook presents a platform that business can build on that people really use. Facebook has users. A lot of users.
To implement the same system for a business, they'd have to deploy their own hardware and software, and then reach out to customers to use their special set up. Sitting on top of Facebook essentially gives them all of this without a problem. Most places can't do what Facebook is providing for them.
So now users have a reason to "Place" themselves at a business, and businesses have a reason to link into the system. A "Place" by a user gives them exposure to the users friends.
Consider also that this isn't the only means a business can use for loyalty. Business still have other means to go for customer retention.
To be fair, they can get a not insignificant part of the benefit by putting a sign outside the venue saying "checkin on Facebook for X" and asking at the counter.
They can then using that list compiled and stored for them for free by Facebook to generate a free mailing list which they can send free messages to and get free metrics on their success.
Most of the most effective ways of marketing on Facebook are free.
Check out Groupon Stores. Groupon just released a self-serve store for deals where you can get customers to follow your business and push out deals to them. They're not exactly the same, but Groupon's new offering is a very different beast than the daily deals it was offering before and much closer to Facebook Deals. Those two combined with the LBS's going to make it very interesting for businesses. Marketing is changing at an increasingly rapid pace and while there are themes, I don't think anyone can guess where it will be in a year or two.
I don't think it's really like groupon. The core of groupon isn't a deal, it's a surge of attention pushed out to a large group of subscribers.
Your point about assimilation deserves some discussion though. I don't think facebook wants to buy any location based companies, it's in a good position now to just be the underlying platform. They don't have a whole lot to gain by buying these companies anymore.
But deals and offers is mostly a sales and support problem, and that's the kind of thing facebook /might/ build through an acquisition.
On a related note (full disclosure), I worked with Signpost when they were Postabon, and I got the question "You mean like Groupon?" 100% of the time until I started differentiating the two in my initial explanation.
I really don't mind being the "product being sold" on Facebook, but I still resent helping to sell my friends, such as by filling their feed with ads for local businesses so that I can save a few bucks. Personally, I draw the line here.
I think the single-sign-on for other apps on iPhone/Android announcement they also made today was more interesting. Also that Zuck said they don't consider iPad to be "mobile" (so don't expect an iPad app any time soon).
I didn't see it mentioned in the blog post, but in the press conference Z said they are not monetizing deals yet, and have no short term plans to.
EDIT: I removed a point saying I didn't think these would be more interesting than what Yelp does until they start to monetize. I think that's too strong a statement.
Except that they have such a huge existing userbase compared to Yelp (both in terms of end-users and businesses who are aware of them, and likely use Facebook themselves already).
That's because you open yelp looking for NEW places to check out, fb/4sq is for the places you already are or friends are. People discovery vs venue/place discovery
You can check yourself in anywhere, tag your friends (whether they're there or not), and see where others are checking in. But I want to use Places to meet up with people, to organize events, to see where my friends' favorite places are. It's just not very good for that.
And it still reeks of poor design -- enough people checking in at your house will force it to be a public location, and there is no process to privatize it again.
It just feels scummy, like much of Facebook.