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Monday, March 14, 2011

Will All Roads Lead Through Facebook?


It seems that Facebook is fast becoming the big aggregator with all applications aligning themselves on your Facebook home page. Watch a movie on Facebook, share it with your friends; find a coupon on Facebook, share it with your friends. Why go to tons of different sites if Facebook brings it all to you. And isn't finding something and sharing it what Facebook is all about. While movies and coupons aren't there just yet, it is clearly the direction of the company. "Facebook Inc. plans to test a Groupon-inspired service that provides discount offers, an effort to use its 500 million-plus members to capitalize on the surging online-deal market."

Just as you open your email every day to catch up, you do the same with Facebook. Heck why not have all email go through Facebook too. Of course, the challenge of too much convergence to one source leads to putting all your eggs in one basket. What happens when the site goes down. When your email goes down and you have to get a message out, you rely on your second email account. Too much dependence on one source also limits our own acts of discovery of other deals. Still the convenience of easily sharing through your social network account is appealing and Facebook continues to capture the trend.

And for those that don't want to be an open book, sharing all their activities online with their "friends", there still remains the old fashion way of cutting coupons for the newspaper. Enjoy!