Yesterday, Groupon quietly released Personalized Deals in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Jose, San Francisco, and Seattle. They’ll be rolling out more cities over the coming months.

The way personalized deals will work is that you provide Groupon with a bit of information and they then provide you with more personalized deals. While I haven’t had any personalized deals sent my way yet {at least I don’t think I have…} I did provide them with my personal info, which consisted solely of the year I was born, gender, and zip code.

Here is how the personalized deals will work, according to the press release:

Each subscriber’s deals will get more relevant over time as they share information and form buying patterns, and as Groupon’s deal offerings expand. Subscribers will see no change to their Groupon interface. They’ll still receive a deal per day via email, available for a minimum of 24 hours.

Customizing deals allows Groupon to run more deals for businesses that are located outside of city centers, that cater to niche audiences, or that aren’t seeking the heavy volume traditional Groupons deliver. Sending different deals to different users also helps address the overwhelming demand from merchants to be featured on Groupon.

“Interest in Groupon is so high we can only feature one out of eight businesses that contact us,” Mason said. “Personalized Deals opens Groupon up to more merchants, who until now have been forced to look elsewhere to find new customers.”

I read through the comments on the blog post where Groupon announced this new plan and it seems that most people are mixed on how they feel about this new platform. While most acknowledge that it would be nice to whittle out some deals that would never be used {such as sushi restaurants for non-sushi eaters}, pretty much everyone agrees that the best part of Groupon is being exposed to new businesses. There is worry that with deals being personalized to someone’s previous purchases and interests that they could miss out on learning about new opportunities.

I must admit that I agree with most of the comments I read. While I love Groupon for the great deals {obvi!}, what I really love is that since the site opened up I’ve greatly expanded the range of activities and restaurants I’ve tried in Chicago. If Groupon personalizes my daily deal based on my previous choices then I will be receiving offers for a lot of Mexican restaurants, steak houses, and ghost tours. Yikes. I also find it a bit alarming that the press release states that they want to make this change because interest is so high on the business side of things. Is the real impetus behind this change so that Groupon can feature more businesses and thus make more money? They’ll be able to feature more businesses and by personalizing the deals they are probably hoping that consumers will be more inclined to purchase more Groupons. I have to admit this change is a smart business decision, but as a consumer, well, I have my doubts.

Here’s hoping they keep it open ended enough that we can keep enjoying many deals, and not just those that the system thinks we will like.

What do you think about this new change for Groupon? Yay or Nay?