Google’s Marissa Mayer spoke at LeWeb in Paris, and reportedly said that Google+ will be launching check-in deals next week.
Google+ has had check-ins for months. They’re easier to access on the iPhone app than the Android app (interestingly enough), and Google has allowed you to check in using Latitude and Google Places for quite some time.
As you may know, Google also has Google Offers, its own deals product. It should be no surprise that Google continues to integrate its various products together. This will continue. It will certainly continue with Google Offers and Google+. It only makes sense that the two should be married.
Last week, Mike Blumenthal discovered a page discussing the check-in offers while perusing the Google Places Offer Help center. He quoted the following text from a page he found (which has since been removed):
If your customers have to visit your locations in order to do business with you, you can request that they check-in on Google+ in order to redeem your offers. They can choose to share the check-in publicly or with some of their circles, which helps spread the word about your business on Google+. They can also choose to keep their check-in private and still redeem an offer.
If your customers do not have to visit your location, for example if you serve homes or businesses by delivery or by callouts, you can keep this option off (set to “No”) and customers will not be asked to check-in when they redeem offers. We use the Service Areas and Location Settings setting on your listing to determine if you have a service area for offers that have already been created. When you create new offers, you can choose whether to allow a check-in during redemption.
This should provide businesses with yet another way to get more out of Google+. Google Offers itself still has quite a bit of expanding to to, in terms of spreading to more cities, but it has been expanding fairly steadily. This should continue for the foreseeable future.
Frederic Lardinois at Silicon Filter quotes Mayer as saying, “We think there are interesting ways we can monetize this, but also ways to help our users save money,” and says she indicated that Google is continuing work on other location products like Latitude.
Some have wondered if Latitude would disappear in favor of Google+. I’m still betting that it will go away eventually, at least as a standalone product, but it appears to be safe for now.