Comment by novum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by novum | Hacker News Reader

Places is still a better deal for advertisers and retailers than it is for my friends, and deals is another step in the direction of empowering them (advertisers and retailers).

You can check yourself in anywhere, tag your friends (whether they're there or not), and see where others are checking in. But I want to use Places to meet up with people, to organize events, to see where my friends' favorite places are. It's just not very good for that.

And it still reeks of poor design -- enough people checking in at your house will force it to be a public location, and there is no process to privatize it again.

It just feels scummy, like much of Facebook.

Facebook, practically by definition, is for the advertisers. Advertisers pay their salaries, after all, and the users are the product that Facebook is selling them.

Certainly. But you wouldn't know it from the language in the Deals announcement, which uses the word "friend" no fewer than 10 times.

  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.

"what is the purpose of Facebook?"

"monetizing relationsips."

I hear this very cynical reasoning often but it's simply not true no matter how populist it is. The main difference is that if you're selling a product or a service and people don't want to buy it, you tweak your product until people will like it. Facebook, however, cannot switch its userbase. It can, however, find new advertisers that are a better fit for its users.

It warns you about checking into at private locations. While I agree that they should have the ability to differentiate between public and private places, Facebook does have a pretty big warning about this. If people are checking your house, they are the ones explicitly saying it's a public place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com