My guess is that the recent 'nearby friends' feature from FB was no coincedence. Once I'm already being alerted that my friends are at the bar I just drove by,

My guess is that the recent 'nearby friends' feature from FB was no coincedence. Once I'm already being alerted that my friends are at the bar I just drove by, why not an alert that the ice cream shop I just passed is having a 25% off sale? Facebook and Google are probably the only companies with enough small business advertisers to pull this off, and I don't think Google has enough active mobile activity to pu this off (especially without WhatsApp). And of course it would be far too risky to build that into Android and push everyone to iOS. I think it's pretty clear Adwords is useless for your local ice cream shop, but an always active mobile alert for nearby customers could provide huge results. I've been expecting this for years but without a massive userbase and a significant number of advertisers it just wouldn't work. I think we're reaching the point where it is viable now though.