It is eventually the time Facebook announced to launch its Deals, first testing of this new feature is scheduled to take place in five cities. These five cities are; San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta and San Diego. This, not exactly new but recently launched, feature is more of a rival to the services provided by Groupon rather than the services of Foursquare. It was first reported by the The New York Times that these local offers made through Facebook Deals will be delivered by e-mail, along with a definite post in the news feeds of the user’s Facebook wall.
Any Facebook user, regardless of any quota or restriction, is allowed to
Image via CrunchBasesign up for the notifications of the Deals. The user only has to move to the landing page of this new feature and just subscribe to the notifications. Whereas only the users residing in these first five test cities will be allowed to actually see and use Deals in the start.
This new feature just launched by Facebook is actually an expansion and continual of it’s previously launched feature Places, which detects and displays the location of the user. Whereas this first local Deals product will be integrally linked to these check-ins through the users Mobile; also meaning that it’s another way to say that Deals will be rather much of an incentive to the previous Facebook users who have already adopted Facebook Places in their daily lives. Furthermore, it will also benefit the marketers and major brands which will be now inclined to invest more money for promotions in the Facebook platform. Facebook has also spontaneously made a page summarizing for users to find these checkin-focused deals on the web.
It is again emphasized that this Deals feature is not a Foursquare-type feature which will reward the users with coupon after each check-in they make at a certain place. It will be rather a Groupon-type voucher redeemable after the user has bought a certificate for a certain good or service at a steep discount, which is normally almost the half off its actual retail price.
Few such deals being initially offered in the Facebook Deals from various brands are like "unlimited bowling with six friends for an evening for $60 (75% off)" or "luxury winery tour and 25% off all wine purchases for $50." Whereas it is very crucial to notify here, that users will only be allowed to buy these Deals using Facebook Credits. This is a very definite measure to increase the concept of virtual currency over the real-world money for the buying and selling of goods and services. It is being suspected that Facebook already had the intentions to kick in Credits in the real world with the Deals type features since its announcement at f8, the same time when Facebook proclaimed its Open Graph.
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