Back in September, Insidefacebook.com revealed that Facebook has brought home somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40 million pounds of bacon. If this wasn’t a good enough sign for the virtual goods world, it looks like Facebook is now on target to get even more cupcakes and wrapped presents trading on the platform.
Facebook is starting to eyeball all those birthdays happening across the site as potential virtual gift sales, and is gearing up to make sure those options appear before friends eyes. It breaks down like so; when facebook friends visit your page on your birthday, the facebook gifts application does an auto launch and presents you with a wide variety of virtual gifts to send to the birthday boy/girl. Each of these virtual gifts costs around 100 credits, or approximately $1.
Not a bad plan, and hey, who can fault fb for offering a service, and turning a decent profit at the same time? Certainly not me…until they flub the interface. The Industry Standard reports that users have been a bit confused as to the new feature. Upon visiting a friend’s page on their birthday, instead of being able to leave a ‘Happy Birthday’ message straight to the friends’ wall, facebook automatically defaults to the gifts tab. Trying to post birthday greets results in a pop-up stating that the user must select a gift (see below). D’oh. Naturally, users can click away from this tab to close the gift app and then click back to the wall to leave their birthday greetings, but it does seem a bit dubious to the unschooled user of facebook.
No doubt, if this birthday pilot program goes well for facebook, we’ll surely be seeing a heckuva lot more virtual gifting options during holiday and special events (send Pete a handful of bottle rockets?).
Now here’s where things get really interesting. You might remember that we reported on facebook’s apparent shelving of a platform-wide microtransaction system. With $30M-$40M of real world cash circulating through the platform, facebook is obviously a very valid mechanism for hundreds of developers to monetize their applications – what gives fb? Is this a blatant snub to 3rd party developers, as they’ll certainly have a harder uphill climb selling their wares if each app requires a different form of currency? Granted, Facebook has not officially said that the microtransactions platform is done and dusted, so perhaps they’re just brewing up something mind blowing in a sub terrainian bunker? Guess we’ll have to wait and see…
