Facebook Deals Being Shut Down, 4 Months After Launch

Facebook has announced
it is shutting down Facebook
Deals, 4 months after launching
the feature in select U.S. cities. The announcement comes just 3
days after we reported that Facebook Places,
which was closely linked to Deals, is being
shut down.


“After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals
product in the coming weeks,” a company spokesperson told Reuters. “We think there is a lot of power in a
social approach to driving people into local businesses. We’ve learned a
lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve
local businesses.”




Facebook initially planned to keep the feature going, with available
deals appearing in your News Feed once you tagged your location in a
status update. It seems that Facebook Deals never really took off in the
same way as other daily deals services such as Groupon and LivingSocial. However,
this could be simply a bump in the road for Facebook when it comes to
daily deals — the social network could have taken some important lessons
away from this experiment and may move back into the daily deals space
at a later date. Who knows, but right now it is closing the doors.


This is the latest in several big announcements that Facebook has
made this week. On Tuesday, the company rolled out new
tools and features to help you gain more control over how you share
content. Earlier Friday, Facebook revealed changes that are being
rolled out to its photo-sharing feature.