Facebook Deals Pat Hand

Facebook announced Deals yesterday, their late-to-the-game piggyback upon Facebook Places.  A pat hand, because the entry by this giant player throws the gauntlet down at Foursquare.

But mostly, pat because while Foursquare is focused on pushing location-based offers to consumers who actually care about and use the service expressly for that purpose, the vast majority of Facebook users will not even know Deals (or other Apps) is there, let alone use it or find it valuable.

It will be interesting to see how Gap, Starbucks and the 20 other retailers now offering Deals do.

Most likely, they will need to reshuffle - a very recent Pew Internet study shows that only 1 in 100 Internet users used a service like Deals on any given day, and usage skews away from women, who do most of America's shopping.

That is still an awful lot of people, but given the late entry, all of the security concerns, and the lack of focus - well, typically, winners cash the chips, and losers say "Deal."  Or will that huge underlying Facebook user base make the difference?

Photo courtesy of PC World