Facebook’s M&A Plans

Email and Social: It’s fashionable to think of email as dead or dying. It’s a chore and can be overwhelming. Yet it’s also the lifeblood of social media applications, which are often email marketing operations at their core. Social apps depend on email to drive engagement and find new users with those annoying emails that someone we don’t know is following us. It will be interesting to see if social apps wean themselves off email. It’s unlikely in the near term, however, particularly since Facebook has cracked down on using its News Feed for marketing blasts.

Facebook Didn’t Kill Foursquare: It turns out Facebook’s check-in functionality didn’t kill Foursquare. Facebook said yesterday it’s moving away from its check-in feature to make location a part of more of its products. It’s not totally clear whether this means Facebook is abandoning the “check-in wars,” as many blogs have said. It is clear that large platforms often don’t kill specialized apps when they move into their territory. The reason is people use Foursquare explicitly to tell their friends where they are. They often use Facebook to look at photos.