Turns out the burgeoning but increasingly complex world of daily deals requires outsized margins that have afforded founder companies Groupon and LivingSocial their success.

Robust local sales efforts are de rigueur to generate enough deal “inventory” to make the consumer proposition viable in a U.S. market worth at minimum $3 billion, according to Opus Research projections — and Facebook, for one, isn't ready to make that kind of commitment.

The social network is checking out of the daily deals business it launched in April in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco. "After testing Deals for four months, we've decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks. We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses. We've learned a lot from our test and we'll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses," said a Facebook statement.Continue reading...

Now that Facebook has entered the location-based services market, "places" – and the information generated by users about those places – is the next digital bonanza.

What to do with all that geo-data? Comedian Stephen Colbert has his ideas. Brand marketers, meanwhile, are eager to reward users for recommendations.

According to Gigaom's Mathew Ingram, the next digital leap forward is for first-generation services like Foursquare "to effectively make social decisions easier." As for which service to go with? Decisions, decisions...Continue reading...