Facebook Gets on the Groupon Train

According to this article from Bloomberg, Facebook will soon launch their own group discount service in select cities soon. Unfortunately, we won't be seeing it here in DC but if you have any friends in San Francisco, San Deigo, Dallas, Atlanta, or Austin, let them know.

Local businesses will be able to sign up to have their deals featured on the site. Facebook made its move to get into the group-discount business before Google, and although they'll have the first-mover advantage over them, it'll be hard to overtake Groupon/Livingsocial/etc.

I think it's easy to see that Facebook is really trying to find different ways to monetize the site now. First, they saw that games like Farmville could rake in cash. Now, this dip into the group-discount arena could start the trend toward things like renting movies through the site, effectively making Facebook the number one site on the internet for social entertainment. Google and Apple can't be too happy about that.