Not sure if that’s how you spell Schmeels but I like it. Anyway, as Greg points out in his post The Problem with Facebook Deals (with a little, let’s say, more grown-up way of summarizing my comment in a previous post on the subject), the problem with all of these local deals is the fundamental lack of a robust user experience in regards to helping people actually use them. I went off in his Facebook Deals will Rock Local where I questioned what possible use is there in giving me the nearest 15 businesses with the random hope that one of them might have deal associated with them (even if I was just thinking, hey, I’m on Fourth and Osborne, maybe I should get a new accountant). Greg points out that all of these apps aren’t taking into account real use cases, like where I am, what I’m looking for now, what I might be looking for later, how far I might be willing to go for a particular deal, etc. The whole problem with the apps is that they really can’t do these kinds of things, given how they (and really the industry as a whole) invariably approaches the problem - algorithmically. What they are able to do is get the user’s location, do a radius search, find the first 15 nearest businesses (because that’s the limit on the screen length), go into a database, find any coupons that match those businesses, and spew the results out. They don’t take into account your “intent” (is that an integer or a string?) and they don’t take into and “knowledge” of local (an accountant is a restaurant is a florist is a business, who cares). Since this is actually a “hard problem” the solution is to ignore it and pass out bright shiny objects (ooh, “I’m a Mayor!”) so they can distract users from that actual truth in that have no $*&(#**% idea how to do local. Now, Greg is optimistic that this will all work out and he’s probably right. When you have cadres of PhDs and acres of computing power you’ll probably figure it out. Like monkeys and Hamlet.
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