Aug 27, 2011 07:41 GMT  ·  By

It seems that Facebook is done with responding to all of the latest fads. The site has announced that it will kill off Deals, its Groupon competitor of sorts, after four months of 'testing.'

Facebook Deals was available in a few cities and the site had a small sales team talking up local businesses for offers. It also aggregated offers from other places. That said, those that got to use it didn't come away impressed.

"After testing Deals for four months, we've decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks," Facebook said in a statement for Reuters.

"We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses," it added.

"We've learned a lot from our test and we'll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses," it said.

Whatever it learned, it's going to apply it to something else as it's done with daily deals. However, it's other deals product, Check-in Deals, is still alive and, presumably, well.

It's a bit ironic in fact, Check-in Deals was initially called simply Deals, but its name was changed four months ago when the new Facebook Deals showed up.

It gets better, Facebook also recently killed off its Places product, which enabled users to check-in at locations. The check-in deals were introduced as part of Places.

Users can still check into places, but the feature is getting pushed to the background. From the looks of it, check-in deals are doing well at Facebook, if everything around them gets shut down and they survive.

It is interesting though that Facebook is killing off some products that were clear responses, if not outright clones, to the popular things of the moment on the web.

Last year, location-based services were very popular, so Facebook launched a Foursquare competitor, Places. This year, daily deal sites are all the rage, so Facebook came up with Deals.

It may be too soon to call it, but maybe Facebook will start focusing more on the core product and on new original ones. Then again, Facebook recently launched Messenger, a group messaging app, a type of service that is very popular lately.

And it's even adding filters to its photos section, to combat the likes of Instagram. Granted, Facebook was never really about innovation and new products, rather, it worked best when refining existing concepts and tools. And it's rather good at it, judging by its 750 million or so users.