Facebook kills another product

Last week we told you about Facebook killing off Facebook Places, its competitor to Foursquare. Over the weekend they also killed off Facebook Deals, the competitor to Groupon. Deals just launched four months ago as a test product in a handful of cities. Well, test over, I suppose and test failed.

From Reuters:

“We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses,” Facebook added in the statement. “We’ve learned a lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses.”

It’s a surprise, certainly, especially so soon after putting this thing out there. But the deals were reportedly not all that great and so people weren’t using them.

It’s another in a long list of examples of companies failing when they stray outside their lane. Facebook was never going to have the same kind of muscle to put behind this as Groupon does. Groupon is all about this and Facebook is all about everything.
Of course there’s a lot of talk about Groupon being in financial trouble right now too and maybe Facebook decided this just isn’t a way to profit.