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Comment by someone_here | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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