Facebook has launched a new applications which lets shops offer money-off deals and special offers to smartphone users.
Facebook Deals builds on three-month old 'Places’ - which broadcasts a user’s location - and lets shops send special offers to mobile users when they 'check in'.
The company has denied that it is planning its own mobile device but is looking for new ways to make its services available to people when they are away from their computers.
By offering deals, Facebook could entice more people to use its location-based check-in service.
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said that the social network has tripled its number of mobile users to about 200 million now, from 65 million at the same time last year.
‘There are things that you can do on mobile phones that you can't do on the normal Web’ Zuckerberg said in a interview following the briefing at the company's headquarters last night.
‘People have their phones with them all the time, so a lot more usage is happening on phones,’ he said.
He added that most of the specialised applications for mobile devices today don't adequately integrate social networking features.
Facebook announced a couple of new features to weave its service into other companies' mobile apps, including technology that automatically uses a Facebook member's user name and password to log into another company's mobile app.
Facebook also said that it would allow other companies to tap into its database of location information, including the friends and businesses that are near a Facebook user, as a way to spur development of a new generation of mobile apps.
Mixing social networking and location services presents Facebook with delicate privacy challenges, including what some say are safety risks involved in people broadcasting their physical location.
The company is already struggling with a number of privacy issues. It admitted that some of its applications violated the social networking company's policies against sharing user information, and promised to fix the problem.
The new mobile features did not change any of Facebook's existing privacy settings and that only information that users have opted to make publicly viewable would be accessible by third-party application makers, the firm claims
Forrester Research analyst Augie Ray said that Facebook would have to work hard to earn users' trust, given recent privacy concerns, before large numbers of people would feel comfortable with some of the new mobile features.
He said Facebook could reap new revenue from its Deals service by allowing certain merchants to make their deals stand out from the crowd.
'Within a year or two, businesses will be bidding to have their deals gain more attention on the Facebook mobile platform, just as they do today in Google Adwords,'
Facebook has already lined up 22 major consumer companies -- including Macy’s and Gap which will give away 10,000 pairs of jeans to customers who 'check in' on Places this Friday.
While there have been media reports that Facebook is secretly developing its own mobile phone, Zuckerberg said that such a strategy would not make sense for Facebook.
'Our goal is not to sell anything physical. Our goal is to make it so that everything can be social,' said Zuckerberg.
'It would be pretty silly for us to go after a strategy that focused on selling small number of phones ... and risk alienating all the partners that we need to work with in order to make all these places more social,' he said.
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