
Facebook Gifts - tksohishi
https://www.facebook.com/about/gifts
======
gfodor
I'm super bullish on this. I think this will end up being FB's first big cash
cow. I never thought advertising was anything more than a stop-gap to cover
costs, Zuck has always hated ads. Personally I thought their big revenue
stream would probably be to start charging for FB Connect, but this makes more
sense. They are basically hooking in at the right point of intent to convert a
user, which is exactly why Google can print piles of money.

This is just step one. Once they get this working they are going to have all
kinds of purchasing behavior and really be able to weave their way into all
sorts of ecommerce scenarios. Their biggest challenge is going to be
fulfillment (you don't want a birthday gift showing up late) so they are
probably going to be very selective in who they partner with and are going to
roll this out very slowly, since first impressions being good is essential.

Edit: Also there are all kinds of social experiments they can run to optimize
conversions with this. If someone you know buys a gift for your friend, you
are going to feel more pressure to do so. Etc.

~~~
tatsuke95
I'm sure this is going to come up repeatedly: what can they offer me from an
eCommerce perspective that Amazon can't? Like most social network benefits, I
think friend recommendations, which I can and do get in real life, are
overrated and useless for the majority of my purchases.

The gifting idea is quaint. But to be full-on eCommerce site, well that's
yesterday's news.

~~~
gfodor
This is going to turn Facebook into the Amazon for gifts. They capture you
exactly at the right point, can (eventually) give pitch-perfect
recommendations, and can get the checkout flow down to be completely painless.
If they execute on this well (and I expect they will) I would guess most gift
purchases will be happening on Facebook in a few years.

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boredguy8
"It's Mary's birthday in 3 days - send her a birthday cupcake?"

I would probably click "yes" if it's < $5.

Not for every FB 'friend', but there's a 'sufficiently close' threshold where,
yes, I'd click that button. Even better if it's day-of fulfillment. And I bet
I'm not alone.

~~~
fletchowns
Such a convenient way to make an empty and meaningless gesture!

~~~
benburleson
Why would that be empty and meaningless? Sure, it's not much effort, but it's
nice to know someone was thinking of you. The fact that it's not free gives it
more weight than a simple "Happy Birthday" post.

~~~
SCdF
They're not thinking of you because Facebook had to remind them.

Try making your birthday private in Facebook one year and see how many happy
birthday messages you get when people aren't prodded by Facebook to care. It's
a _lot_ less.

~~~
zacharycohn
I've reached the number of friends on Facebook where at least ONE person is
having a birthday every day.

I probably only post 10-15 "happy birthday!" posts a year. So every day I
check to see who's birthday it is. If it's someone I'm close to, then I post
something.

If Facebook didn't have them displayed, I would probably have those 15
birthdays written down on a real world calendar, and I'd just check that.

~~~
mehulkar
Just a few more poorly measured statistics from me: I have 1200+ friends, have
about 10-15 birthdays a week. Never post on their walls, don't have my
birthday listed. Get maybe 10-15 wishes a year on my wall. Text/call about
10-15 people a year (not including family). Before I removed my birthday, I
had about 700 friends and would get around 100 wall posts.

Going to try an experiment where I make a random day my birthday, delete all
the posts that catch on to the fake birthday, and then change it to a month
later. Will post results.

~~~
robryan
Yeah, I have seen people do this, definitely will get a lot of messages still.
Facebook limits the amount of times you can change your birthday, likely
because of this.

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marquis
"Now you can do something more meaningful" (than a hey, happy birthday call or
message). It disappoints me when I hear wording like this, there is nothing
more meaningful about paying money for a present that took you two clicks and
is probably already part of a pre-selected group of items from their
profile/history, than thinking of something to write on their wall in two
clicks.

All power to Facebook to make it work though: maybe if they can monetize
themselves through means like this they'll pay more attention to privacy
issues as they will have less incentive to make everything public for
advertising/selling data.

~~~
sbochins
I'd rather get a message from someone than a cupcake with no personal message
any day of the week. When I was a child and I cared more about material
objects that the people around me and whether or not they care for me, I would
have picked the cupcake. But I don't use Facebook either, so I guess this
whole Gift's thing doesn't really apply to me.

~~~
prostoalex
There's got to be a technology that allows attaching message to the said
cupcake.

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LaGrange
Oooh, now that's the way to get real names + addresses out of people. Neat. It
also involves social pressure -- now not giving away your address will mean
rejecting a gift.

~~~
rm999
Doing anything with addresses is risky from a legal and privacy perspective -
I doubt facebook can get away with snailmail spam without permission, for
example. Nor do I think they want to do that.

For geographic targeting IPs and user-entered information are usually good
enough. Also, as gsharma mentions, facebook has tons of geographic information
on users from mobile, which is better because it reflects where you actually
spend your time and doesn't go stale.

I doubt facebook will extract much value from physical addresses. Rather, I
think this is purely part of their monetization strategy. They can double the
average user's contribution to their revenue from a single five dollar
purchase. Also, I'm wondering if this is facebook's attempt at building a
payments platform. I think this industry will be worth tons of money in the
short and long term future.

~~~
jfager
FB doesn't want real names and addresses so they can start sending out
snailmail spam, they want them so that they can start user matching with
advertising partners' CRM databases.

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waterlesscloud
All depends on the quality of the gifts. If they're chintzy, good luck. But if
it's quality stuff, cool. It's got to be of a higher level than Zynga was for
apps.

Facebook would be served best by controlling gift quality with an iron fist.
I'm a little skeptical they'll do that, but maybe.

This is very cool, though "Friends ... can swap for a different size, flavor
or style before the gift ships."

Still. Quality. Quality. Quality.

~~~
mtgentry
As a selected vendor, I must say they do seem focused on quality. I'm clearly
biased but the impression I got from the buyer is they're being very picky.

Another thing that will be tricky is separating signal and noise. If I'm
buying a birthday gift for my punk rock friend, they shouldn't bother showing
me cupcakes and chocolate boxes. Seems like a no-brainer to show me gift
options based on his likes.

~~~
MartinCron
I would love to hear more, if you have more to share.

~~~
mtgentry
They're selling a lot of things that you would expect to see on fab.com. And I
think they only have 100 vendors to start?

All Things D has a good write up: [http://allthingsd.com/20120927/say-hello-
to-gifts-facebooks-...](http://allthingsd.com/20120927/say-hello-to-gifts-
facebooks-new-mobile-revenue-stream/)

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timothya
I'm friends with a few people on Facebook who I'd consider to be very popular.
1000+ friends with many guys vying after their attention. Every time they post
a picture of themselves it will be hit with 50 likes (mostly from males) in
the first hour.

I bet these people will be swimming in gifts once it's released.

~~~
danielweber
So the skills one learns pretending to be a female elf in World Of Warcraft
will soon let you get real swag.

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k-mcgrady
A much better idea than the original 'virtual gifts'. I could really see this
taking off although it will take some time to reach users around the world.
Maybe they will partner with Amazon for distribution. I wonder how this would
affect Facebook's bottom line if a large percentage of their users started
taking advantage of it. Combined with the birthday notifications everyone is
used to it could generate significant revenue.

e.g. What is you clicked a birthday notification and instead of just an option
to post to the persons wall you could send a gift? Lots of opportunity here
for Facebook to integrate this.

Edit: just watched the video and they are integrating with birthdays.

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3am_hackernews
Is this the result of the Karma acquisition [1]?

[1][http://blog.getkarma.com/post/23305446792/karma-is-moving-
to...](http://blog.getkarma.com/post/23305446792/karma-is-moving-to-facebook-
why-social-gifting-is)

~~~
dfriedmn
Signs certainly point to yes.

~~~
natrius
More than signs: <https://www.facebook.com/blake/posts/466860813344232>

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jbwyme
When I first started reading, I thought "Now THIS is something Facebook should
have been doing all along. It's a perfect fit.". Then I read:

 _2\. Your friend is notified instantly

Friends enter their own shipping info and can swap for a different size,
flavor or style before the gift ships._

What!? This seems like a huge product miss. It's almost the equivalent of
buying someone a gift card. It removes the element of surprise that makes gift
giving great and takes a lot of personality out of giving the gifts. I get
that it's more practical but since when has giving gifts been about
practicality?

IMO it would be a much better implementation to say "a friend is sending you a
gift! Fill out your address so we can ship it out to you: ...".

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gsharma
Here is something interesting Facebook can/may do: Apart from showing
variations of the gifts (such as colors, flavors, etc.) have another option of
"Save $xx as Facebook Credits." Once people have Facebook Credit sitting in
their accounts they'll be more inclined to use Facebook to pay for things.

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rishi
It looks like Facebook allows businesses to add their products into their
"Gift Store"

<https://www.facebook.com/help/444702442234880>

This might be a great way to get your physical product in front of millions of
people.

~~~
jmj4
Perfect for local business shops too. Think of a local flower shop, I bet
birthday orders could be huge for that type of thing. It scales decently as
well if the business adds itself.

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veb
Does this mean I can buy my friends a beer? Because that'll be better than
buying them a ... cupcake.

~~~
MartinCron
Cupcakes are, at the moment, a far less heavily regulated industry.

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yelsgib
Even reading the title of this sent me into a downward spiral of intense
paranoia/hatred/annoyance/terror. Was gift giving not already enough of a
stilted, rote interaction? Do we need to systematize EVERYTHING!?! Is there no
escape from this? What have we become?

~~~
nkwiatek
You sound like you could use a gift.

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smackfu
In case you have a feeling of deja vu:

Last Call for Facebook Gifts
(<https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=405727117130>)

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bicknergseng
I think FB needs a lot more of this. Their API is basically essential for many
tech startups these days, and a lot of things 3rd parties are doing they could
and should be doing themselves. Where is the FB game development studio? The
FB Spotify competitor (not FB music that was a rubbish attempt)? FB Yelp? FB
amazing-idea-of-tomorrow-that-utilizes-the awesome-power-of-nearly-a-billion-
users?

I still think the FB marketplace is something they haven't spent nearly enough
time on. Oodle just isn't cutting it, and FB could easily compete with eBay or
Craigslist. In fact, Facebook should be competing with CL in everything. I
don't think it needs to be motivated by revenue, but by an actual desire to
make amazing products using the FB graph in all those areas. Just some
thoughts.

------
kin
Anyone remember the old Facebook gifts? The ones that were virtual? People
even paid for those! I think people will for sure participate in this. Who
doesn't want to extend a nice gesture to their friend.

~~~
jarek
I do. I'm not aware of anyone I know actually buying anything, we were always
searching for the free ones when it was birthday or flirting time. But then
again, university students have a lot of time to invest into free.

For some reason I've had 4 Facebook credits on my account since that era even
though I never bought any.

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jes5199
I think this is brilliant. Shouting "Happy Birthday" is really the most
consistently used feature of Facebook, it makes a lot of sense to turn it into
an opportunity to sell something - and lower the barrier for people to send
gifts (there's a lot of steps involved in getting a greeting card and
addressing it and buying a stamp...)

And they could size this up over time - like, ten of your friends from college
are going in $1-each on sending you flowers after your recent breakup. I think
people would actually do that.

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richardw
They should automate it. Add a registry of stuff we want, have people set up
automatic deductions when (good) friends hit their birthdays/anniversaries,
add up the amount of cash and buy whatever it can afford, send thank-you
letter to each person, and a "pleasure" email back. And a "we must get
together soon" discussion, also automated.

Much as it's nice receiving the smallest personal message from someone you
haven't spoken to, I am a touch jaded at how automatic birthday reminders are.
Can you tell? :)

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robryan
This is going to be great for merchants that can get on. I'd imagine Facebook
are going to be even harder to work with than something like the Amazon
Marketplace, the last thing they will want is what should be low friction gift
transactions to go wrong.

As someone who sells online in cosmetics (which covers a to of stuff that
makes good gifts) I do hope they open it up a fair amount. I would imagine
though they are going to be fairly restrictive for a long time about who they
partner with though.

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sravfeyn
May be Facebook will open it's 'Gifts market place' to finely-tested eCommerce
businesses through an API!!

This is more meaningful, because Facebook doesn't want to be an eCommerce
company. It's vision is connecting the world. And it makes more sense to open
the platform to external businesses which are tested for 'great experience'.
In this way Facebook itself will not have to be another eCommerce company and
it can have just enough control, share and work over the platform.

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sravfeyn
May be Facebook will open it's Gift market place to finely-tested eCommerce
businesses through an API!!

This is more meaningful, because Facebook doesn't want to be an eCommerce
company. It's vision is connecting the world. And it makes more sense to open
the platform to external businesses which are tested for 'great experience'.
In this way Facebook itself will not have to be another eCommerce company and
it can have just enough control, share and work over the platform.

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mikek
This is why Facebook acquired Karma.

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sidcool
Facebook as payment system? I still don't have enough confidence on how secure
their system is. Also, sharing home address with them is not a smart move.

~~~
BryanB55
It sounds like they should let you update your privacy settings to
automatically reject gifts if you dont want to share your address... Something
like "sorry, this person is not accepting Facebook Gifts".

~~~
loceng
And why would they not try to tease you letting you know someone has sent you
a gift? I wonder if at some point they'll have a malfunction that tells
everyone a gift is waiting for them, and so they need to fill in their address
details..

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shawndrost
I don't see anyone else mentioning this, but this is probably the rebranded
version of this year's acquisition, Karma Science.

~~~
Eduard
Yep, it is, see Jared Morgenstern's recent post regarding Facebook Gifts:

"[...] We looked so hard that we found a company called Karma who quite
literally dreamt about social gifting. Lee Linden and Ben Lewis, their vision,
and their team, impressed us so much that we acquired their company, and four
months later, we're ready to unveil what they've been working on."

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alexkhadiwala
As long as the gifts are more useful and desirable than their last
implementation of facebook gifts, and they can provide a good API for the
fulfiller of the gift to fulfill the order, whether it be virtual or physical,
this could be really great. I think it'd also be a good idea if you could get
numerous friends to chip in for a gift.

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icey
Any Facebookers around who work on this? It would be really sweet to have a
few "Charitable Giving" options. The more the merrier. Everyone in my family
does charitable donations for Christmas / some birthdays, and it'd be fun to
do it for people who I'd normally just message.

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dawernik
Amazon without all the fulfillment overhead and all the event driven and
social context. First pass was virtual gifts right? This is physical.
Interesting, but needs some major fortitude.

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MojoJolo
_Pick out the perfect gift, add your message and it's ready to ship – no
address needed._

I'm intrigue with that no address needed. How to ship without the address?

~~~
jpadvo
The recipient is notified of the gift, then needs to input their own shipping
address.

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_pius
This is probably a good time to think about buying FB stock.

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andrejewski
Now I'm really going to have to worry about leaving my account open on my
devices. They didn't show it but these payments need some type of password
protection.

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chmod775
One of the few product launches you see nowadays that does _not_ have a share
button. Why facebook didn't put a share button on there is puzzling.

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frisco
This seems like the entirely wrong thing to optimize. There are so many other
opportunities for Facebook to monetize:

    
    
      - group buying around deals, or group buying in general
      - "Pay by Facebook" Facebook Connect based payment system
      - Facebook Presence based loyalty programs
    

among many other easier things than gifts. Gifting does not seem like low
hanging fruit.

~~~
MartinCron
This is fundamentally social and something that pretty much _only_ Facebook
can do. I know that there are a lot of companies trying to compete in the
loyalty, group buying, and payment platforms.

~~~
frisco
Yes, but Facebook has a billion users and the ability to make the right
relationships with literally every card processor. And, group buying _is_
inherently social. I don't see why these aren't at the top of Facebook's list
for things to try.

~~~
MartinCron
Is group buying inherently social? I've never participated, nor has anyone in
my circle asked me to. Maybe I'm just in the wrong circle.

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rizwan
Looks like <http://www.treater.com/>

~~~
mrcharrington
Treater is more about instant (treat your friend to something which they can
get right away) and small "just because" type stuff. Disclaimer: I work there.

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paulhauggis
I had this idea a couple of years ago. I'm interested to see how well this
works.

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chengyinliu
I am wondering why did they announce it before they actually push it out to
users?

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pazimzadeh
The voice in the video sounds a lot like Mark Zuckerberg, can anyone else
confirm?

~~~
CGamesPlay
I don't know whose voice that is, but it definitely isn't Zuck.

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mmanfrin
There is an excessive amount of cynical snark in this thread.

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ed209
I would love to see Etsy get in on this.

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sxsde
WTF?

