November 03, 2008

Facebook's coming payment system

1 comment:

John Powers said...

I have little patience with the virtual gifts at Facebook. But this payment system does seem the beginning of something big. My confusion really revolves around my notions of virtual and real. Clearly "gifts" are real even if I don't now respond to them as so.

I really loved the link you posted to Some Rights Reserved that stuff seems pretty real. I may be missing the boat in some important ways, but buying stuff like that with FB credits seems a great leap forward.

Yinn.ca recently introduced micropayments with their phone card. It seems micropayment systems like that connected to FB credit systems are pretty cool because it opens a way for so many people to participate economically at FB. Your idea of FB being a customer relations platform gains traction.

Surely there are holes in my thinking. But this article interested me. Compete looked at this hypothesis: “I don’t have the data to prove it, but my guess is if you looked at the percent of all pageviews that are generated each month, a much smaller portion exist on the top 10 properties today than in 2000, at the height of the first Internet era.”

The results were: "Contrary to Fred’s theory and the larger theory of the Long Tail, the top internet properties are accounting for a larger percentage of total pageviews across the web. Currently, the Top 10 domains* account for 40% of the total pageviews on the internet – a 29% increase over the last five years."

The big difference was social networks. Getting some sort of payment system running is key to developing value these big sites so the FB news seems really big to me.