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Facebook takes on Groupon

In one of the least surprising news stories of the day, Facebook is to take on Groupon with its ‘Facebook Deals’ service, a dull name, but a heavyweight concept.

It is reportedly launching in the US first and will be a ‘deal of the day’ offering rather than the easily confused ‘Facebook Places Deals’ which provides you with special offers when you check into a place.

Although Facebook has been an innovator in many ways, they are no stranger to taking on competitors with extensions of their own service, for example Twitter and Foursquare.

And Facebook is ideally placed to make a success of the ‘deal of the day’ phenomenon. They have built up an incredibly rich data set about their users, so can match their interests to their location to what their friends are buying. Plus of course Facebook users check into the service regularly, so seeing the deal of the day would work in this context.

And if they can pull it off, perhaps it’s time to recalculate those sky-high valuations for Groupon…

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