Sunday, October 24, 2010

Self-Serve Makes Sense For GroupOn, Also FourSquare

Groupon logo.Image via Wikipedia
Yipit: Groupon Reveals Its Future Lies In Self-Serve: “Groupon Stores is a place where your favorite, local businesses can sign up, create a store page, and post deals at anytime for you to see. Welcome to the future of Groupon.” ..... if self-serve can dramitically increase the number of available offers then personalization should improve..... Receiving offers is already one of the leading reasons for consumers to follow businesses on Facebook and Twitter

This also makes tremendous sense for FourSquare to do, and others in the location space, like FoodSpotting. This is the essence of monetizing those services. Once you hand over the steering wheel to the specific businesses, you are then free to focus on adding and enrichening features. You get to focus more on
Image representing Foursquare Solutions as dep...Image via CrunchBase product, your product, and less on trying to cut deals, one business at a time. Cutting deals one business at a time is the old library way of searching. You walk one aisle at a time, you take a look one book at a time. The thing to do instead is to create a platform that businesses can use themselves. You serve them, they serve their customers. You help them serve their customers. That's where the money is.

This move has API written all over it. Diffuse.

In the long term Facebook is not a website you go to. It is the machine that makes it possible for you to carry your social graph with you wherever you go, first on the web, and then wherever. By wherever I mean we
Image representing Foodspotting as depicted in...Image via CrunchBasewill reach a point where because of wireless broadband, we are never really offline. The internet becomes the ocean we permanently live in. We will have become fish.

Google Adsense and Adwords have been self-serve for years. The concept is not new, but its allure now, if anything, is greater.

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