Facebook shuts down Deals

This news can be interpreted according to your affinity for Groupon. If you're skeptical, this is yet another strike against the model, the canary in the coal mine. If you're optimistic about Groupon, this is a win, a step toward answering the claim that there's no means for them to outcompete all of the clones.<p>It will be interesting to see if any more details come out, and if it's possible at all to establish which interpretation is closer to the truth.

Running a successful deals program in the current (competitive) market requires two things that it seems Facebook isn't much inclined to provide: (1) non-engineer staffing, to find and close deals with merchants and (2) customer service.

This coupled with the abandoning of Places makes me think Facebook is undergoing a serious narrowing of focus. While I'm clearly not a fan (as you can probably judge from my comments), I'd still like to see a company that gets lots of press do something innovative or, in absence of that, just new and different. The pessimist in me thinks it will be yet another web platform play.

Very interesting. It's clear that Groupon is willing to dedicate a lot of pre-IPO capital to the project. Facebook probably figures that it's not worth giving up being profitable to do. At least not yet.<p>In many cases the second or third mover can still win. Think Yahoo and then Google in search. (Whatever did happen to Altavista?)

The area that Groupon really shines in, and that Google was trying to acquire, is the vast number of local salespeople on the ground. Customer service and interaction are not Facebook's strong points.

They're not shutting down deals. They're shutting down the desktop version - the mobile deals product still lives.<p>I think this is a sign that people are more likely to use a deals product when it's relevant to their location and current activity.

Is Groupon next?

It may be more lucrative to partner with deal sites and take a cut of revenue through ads and the like - without the expense. In some way, Facebook Deals is like Google getting into ecommerce - it's better just to be a middle man and sell ads.