The Number One Killer Feature of Facebook Deals: Structured, verified, meaningful demographic and taste data. You think the retailers with whom you redeem a Facebook Deal aren’t going to be shown your favorite music, TV show, your education level, some level of details about your friends and much more – at least in aggregate? You’re kidding yourself. That info is gold and it’s going to be the real killer for Facebook Deals.

And while deals of the Groupon variety arrive via email, a Facebook rep told the New York Times that in addition to email offers, Facebook deals will push offers directly into your news feed.

For the moment at least, the program is only being tested in five cities: Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco.

The more advertisers of all types experiment with web, mobile and social advertising, the more they will come to appreciate the power of the digital media to tightly target qualified prospects while granularly measuring the costs and effectiveness of their campaigns.

Jeff Jarvis says more of the same, predicting continuing declines in newspaper circulation, downward pressure on ad rates, and an imminent event horizon in which we’ll hit “the end of a critical-mass of circulation needed to maintain inserts” thereby “tak[ing] away a primary justification for still printing and distributing paper.”

The vast majority of Google’s search results are automated. But the company can — and often does — take manual action to bury sites that are running afoul of its rules. Google’s powerful webspam team serves as its search referees. Incur their wrath, and online oblivion follows.

Former Outside magazine editor Mark Bryant, who is part of the project, says publishers shouldn’t see it as a threat:

Bryant described Byliner as less a competitor for existing publishers and more a central gathering place for long-form journalism. It will provide some of its own content, he said, but also direct readers to stories elsewhere.

Perhaps with that in mind, insurance brokers in Canada are developing a “Twitter Insurance” product to protect companies from the careless tweets made by staff.

Meanwhile, Arianna paid a visit to Mapquest’s new headquarters in Denver on the occasion of its 15th birthday reception that “was meant to show the company has changed along with the rest of AOL.”

Brisbane found it unseemly that his media writers were taking swipes, and slipping shivs, into other news orgs. To which Shafer replied:

Nobody deserves the lash more than publishers, editors, reporters, press critics, and public editors. The press corps may squeal bloody murder when tapped, but journalists are a lot tougher about taking criticism and fielding barbed questions than Brisbane suggests. Why? Because the same thing he accuses the Times of doing is what reporters and editors do every day to mayors, police chiefs, the clergy, Wall Street, scientists, captains of industry, foreign dignitaries, judges, teachers, athletes, fashion designers, jailers, revolutionaries, air-traffic controllers, bankers, bakers, firefighters, gurus, poets, inventors, economists, janitors, federal regulators, and others.

Ours is mostly a negative business: We exist to put our finger between the anvil and the falling hammer and come back to tell our audiences how much life hurts.