While many reporting on the roll-back of Facebook Deals today have been quick to celebrate Foursquare’s apparent conquering of the space, others quite succinctly point out that Facebook may simply be adjusting the way in which users identify locations, perhaps to greater effect.

Henry Talbot is the Founder of Loopster Media, the preferred partner of Buddy Media in the Asia Pacific region, providing sophisticated technology to harness Facebook for business. Talbot confirms what many brands using Facebook already know all too well, “Facebook have obviously rolled out places, seen what’s worked: seen the good side of it and seen the bad side of it. Certainly from a business perspective, anybody could create a place and it became incredibly messy. You’ve got more businesses trying to get on Facebook and to have a structured environment; you’ve got 20 versions of the same page [created by users].”

The update has been tangled up in messaging about increased privacy for Facebook users. Where in the past friends of users could be checked in to places and tagged in pictures without their consent, new settings allow for users to set their privacy levels to require their consent to be tagged, before the tags go live. This is not the default, but an available feature. This functionality comes together with a proposed more open opportunity for tagging – in that Facebook members who aren’t Facebook friends of users will be able to be tagged, and that businesses which don’t form part of the user’s community can also be tagged. Whilst the scope for increased privacy is available, the scope for less privacy is the default.

The functionality of Facebook’s proposed location tagging system, which will include tagging visits to businesses, extends to status updates and photos. “That’s one reason that they might have done it,” says Talbot. “They’ve kind of blended it, it’s more about turning location into a blended experience with your status update and rather than having it as a distinct, ‘I’ve got to go to places to check in and then do a status update it’s just blending it back together. It’s just evolution, really.”

The evolution, which is reportedly in beta, will in fact allow users to tag locations in status updates and pictures, which will prompt deals to appear on their news feed, below the update, which they can then select and claim. The organic approach to providing deals when a prompt is received from a status or picture update could in fact give deals more mileage than a dedicated Facebook Places mobile app. Users will also be able to tag locations from their desktop (Facebook Places was previously only accessed via mobile).

Overall, as Facebook deals is in relative infancy in the Australian market, hard figures on benefits are hard to come by. The benefits of the new approach will be in increased privacy if brands and users change their settings. There is some value in brands protecting tagging of their pages. As Talbot highlights, “I think from a business perspective, a few months ago they gave people the ability to tag a brand page, so imagine I fall over drunk in a ditch and I’ve got a bottle of Jack Daniels in my hand – I could tag Jack Daniels and it would appear on their page. From a business perspective, it gives them greater control over what content is going to be tagged with their name on it.”

Talbot also sees the changes as quite timely. “Most businesses in the marketplace that we see here are still getting together their Facebook planning across the enterprise, so they’re definitely thinking about it from an individual brand perspective, from an enterprise-wide perspective, with multiple locations. I think it’s still early days so these changes should link up quite nicely with that.” As for how Facebook deals will relate to Foursquare or Yelp, Talbot says, “Good question, I don’t know right now. You can definitely put a Foursquare or Yelp or some other kind of application in there. Foursquare has its own benefits and its own knock-on… Facebook places will continue to evolve. Who knows what kind of relationship they will strike up with the Foursquare guys. It’s definitely not a formal partnership at the moment. You now, who knows where that will go?”

Facebook has been contacted for comment and we will update this post upon further contact.

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Twitter role:

Featured: Henry Talbot: @talbsinoz,  Loopster Media: @loopstermedia

Article by: Lou Pardi: @loupardi, @smkapac