Now that Facebook has announced their Deals offering for Places they have taken a massive step towards enabling immediate redemption for checkin activity. It is this instant gratification that I feel completes the Facebook geoloctation platform.

Location based services are now poised to go mainstream. New research out from Pew indicates a pretty low take up of “geosocial”, but that’s before Facebook came along. Current research from Pew indicates that there is a 2 to 1 gender gap with 6% of males and 3% of females using location based services. One would had have to think that deals will accelerate the take-up of places, especially with female shoppers. Indeed there has been a marked pick up in high end Places implementations recently in the US, be it a Facebook Places loyalty programme for Starbucks or today’s Gap campaign to give away 10k pairs of jeans for the first 10k people to checkin.

It really is exciting times as a developer to be working on real life social commerce & location tools, mashing together mobile, Facebook opengraph and location. We have been head down in a few places campaigns that are going live over the coming weeks. Some of the technical builds have been challenging, but really powerful. We’ll do our best to share some of our technical learning as soon as we can.