Facebook Deals is a Groupon rival

It seems that in the tech world once a company has a good idea their is a rush of other companies that try to cash in on the same idea with a small twist. Groupon is a deals service that sends out coupons and other deals to users that they can use to save some money on the things they like to purchase. Once Groupon started getting headlines other competing services started to launch with some of them being from huge firms like Google's Google Offers service.

Google isn't the only popular site looking to get on the Groupon rival bandwagon, Facebook is too. Facebook has announced the launch of a new online deals feature called simply Facebook Deals. The service was announced officially late yesterday and the five test cities are supposed to go live today. The test cities include Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco. Facebook hopes that its huge number of friends and other users that are linked on the site will help the Deals to be easy for users to share and spread around.

The deals will be sent to the user via email, but Facebook figures that a deal that is appropriate for you will show up in your news feed at some point in the day. Facebook's Emily White said, "You can receive Facebook deals via e-mail. But if there is a deal that is good for you, it will likely show up in your news feed at some point in the day." Deals will be very tightly woven into the site according to White and users that want to get in on the Deals service will need to "like" the page.

[via Facebook]