

Introducing Facebook Deals - ssclafani
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=446183422130

======
novum
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.

It just feels scummy, like much of Facebook.

~~~
someone_here
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.

~~~
novum
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.

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benzheren
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.

~~~
immad
You mean Tencent QQ: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ>

~~~
benzheren
Yah, this is the company I mean. They are huge in China.

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ssebro
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.

~~~
zoomzoom
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?

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mayanklahiri
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?

~~~
catshirt
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.

~~~
thwarted
This seems like the kind of hubris that will come back to bite him in the ass.

Maybe someone can take a screenshot of their iPhone showing the deal, then
send it to their friends.

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colkassad
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.

~~~
thwarted
An old tweet of mine:

Whenever I see or hear "facebook.com/foo" I think "AOL keyword foo".

<http://twitter.com/thwartedefforts/status/15794051975>

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iantimothy
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).

~~~
jasonlotito
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.

~~~
notahacker
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.

------
nathanwdavis
This seems like 'Foursquare meets Groupon'. It will be interesting to see who
gets assimilated.

~~~
jfager
Where's the "meets Groupon" part? Look exactly like just Foursquare to me...

~~~
bialecki
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.

------
ayu
The most practical thing I got out of this was that free jeans are coming
soon:

"Gap: Giving blue jeans to the first 10,000 customers to claim their deal."

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bl4k
Step 1. Take all the deals from Facebook deals

Step 2. Build an iPhone app or web page that lets a user pick a location and
prints out a deal to look like a Facebook deal

Step 3. Get your user to show the deal to the counter

Step 4. WIN! (or profit..)

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kmfrk
Link doesn't seem to work anymore. Does anyone have the skinny on it or the
replacement link?

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powrtoch
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.

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glhaynes
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).

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chopsueyar
Facebook could potentially be sued by Tippr (so could Groupon).

[http://gigaom.com/2010/04/16/tippr-buys-up-collective-
buying...](http://gigaom.com/2010/04/16/tippr-buys-up-collective-buying-
patents-to-take-on-groupon/)

Unless Zuck & Co. ponies up like they did for the Friendster patents.

~~~
mkramlich
the old "it's possible to own an idea or pattern in nature" thing. i love
that. patents -- oh how I hate thee, let me count the ways.

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acgourley
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.

~~~
tnorthcutt
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).

~~~
acgourley
I bet yelp has more queries per unit of time of people looking for places to
go shop/eat/drink.

~~~
brianbreslin
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

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tlack
I feel like this should best be handled by outside apps rather than the FB
platform itself.

Edit: Perhaps I should offer the disclaimer that my suite of Facebook tools
(fanbldr.com) will eventually include some Places-linked features.

~~~
steveklabnik
My old intern's new startup does this: <http://devoteeapp.com/>

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gshannon
Well, it was nice knowing ya Groupon.

