14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook held a huge press event to showcase its mobile strategy and to announce a couple of new products and technologies as well as launch updated apps for the two major mobile platforms.
One of the new products it launched is Facebook Deals, which, as the name implies, enables users to find deals from businesses, unsurprisingly, by integrating them with the existing Places functionality.
"Starting today, local businesses will be able to offer you deals when you check in to their place on Facebook. Deals will be rolling out over the next few days and will only be available in the United States at this time," Facebook's Jon Fougner writes.
"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," he added.
One of the crucial components of Facebook Deals is location. The social network wants the deals to be relevant to your whereabouts so the feature is tied into its mobile products.
You can find Deals in the iPhone Facebook app, which was updated at the same event, or via the mobile website touch.facebook.com, built for touch-based smartphones. The feature will be added to the Android mobile app at some point in the future. Deals are only available in the US for now.
Via the Places section, you can see a list of locations near you. The ones with active deals will be highlighted. If the deal is interesting to you, you can check in at the location and then just show your phone to the cashier to redeem it.
For now, there are four types of deals. Individual deals are targeted at a single user and are usually discounts, free stuff or even rewards like in other location-based services.
There are also friend deals which can be redeemed when a number of friends check in together at the same place. If you're a regular customer at a certain location, you will be able to get loyalty deals. Finally, there are charity deals in which donations are made in exchange for check-ins.
Facebook is launching the new feature with a number of partners and businesses will be able to create their own deals via the tools the social network provides.
The company says that the feature doesn't have a commercial component yet, meaning that Facebook doesn't make any money from the deals, but the potential of the feature, at the scale Facebook operates, is pretty obvious.