Facebook, Mobile, Freeconomics, iPad and Social Media in one story

Yes, dear reader, who could resist the linkbait of this one - Facebook has launched a service down the well worn path of allowing local businesses to push their special deals onto your mobile phone. The interesting thing is, as Inside Facebook explains:

The most interesting part of the product is that Facebook isn’t taking a cut of revenue for these discounts, posing a challenge to smaller competitors that use deal revenue as part of their business model. On a business’ Places page, they can set up an offer. There are four kinds:

- Individual deals, which reward a customer if they check-in once.
- Loyalty deals, which reward customers for a certain number of purchases or check-ins.
- Friend deals, which reward customers if they bring in extra friends.
- Charity deals, which allow businesses to donate to charity for every check-in they attract.

So - well worn Use Case, but with Freeconomic play from subsidisation elsewhere to push for-pay startups out the space and grow market share fast (roll over Groupon, and do tell Foursquare the news....).

But it won't be available on the iPad - TechCrunch:

Zuckerberg was pretty blunt when it came to explaining why there wasn’t an iPad launch during today’s mobile event: “The iPad isn’t mobile”. He later qualified this statement to say that Facebook loves working with Apple, but that the iPad isn’t as mobile as a phone (he’s right).

In other words, the use case and demographic for the iPad is not likely to support a shedload of coupon adsh*t on their screens. Guess which device I am using around town from now on

There is a substantial customer subsegment that clips coupons, so there is no doubt a market for this - but what size this is, what they are worth vs the cost to serve, and whether they will wade through all the Adcr*p on such a small screen will be interesting to see, it may well be that Facebook is better off limiting its players to a smaller number of (large, high paying) high street brand names.

Definitely a "watch with interest", as I think the "No iPad" rule means they have clearly carefully considered the market (Zuckerberg thinks the iPad is a computer - we agree). I suspect that the iPhone user demographic will be rarer users too by the way.

(Disclosure - we have helped two interactive mobile Ad startups set up their businesses, so we know there is a market, and roughly where it is....)