FACEBOOK SHELVES "FACEBOOK DEALS"

Facebook has decided to shelve its Facebook Deals product, a service that was launched to compete with other coupon service providers such as Groupon and LivingSocial. “After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks,” Facebook told Reuters. “We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses. We’ve learned a lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses.” Facebook will instead focus on Pages, Sponsored Stories and its Ads product. Facebook announced Deals in November and began testing the service in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco. It partnered with aDealio, Gilt City, HomeRun, kgb deals, OpenTable, Plum District, PopSugar City, ReachLocal, Tippr, viagogo and zozi to power the service.

NEW APPLE DEVICE COMING?

Some eagle-eyed readers have spotted a strange new text string added to the iTunes preview of some iOS apps, which identifies an "ix.Mac.MarketingName" as one of the compatible devices with software designed for iOS. We're seeing it listed alongside a whole bunch of apps, but importantly not all of them, which hints that it might not be just a stray piece of code or a bug in the system. The location-aware and voice-centric MyVoice Communication Aid and Microsoft's Bing for iPad apps do not include that funky MarketingName code, suggesting that it's there as a placeholder for a new supported device of some sort -- could apps finally be coming to the Apple TV?