

Facebook’s embedded option - 001sky
http://cdixon.org/2012/09/16/facebooks-embedded-option/

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tokenadult
Going into China is not likely to help Facebook make more money. Facebook
offering a payment service (which, I agree with another top-level comment,
seems like the "obvious" thing for Facebook to do) I would never trust,
because Facebook breaks too many of its features too regularly. If the
attitude of the engineering team is "don't be afraid to break things," I'm not
going to put my financial data through their servers. Not no way, not no how.

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nicholassmith
Out of the options I think search is the most likely, followed by entry into
China and then payments way down the stack.

Search is obviously a big, big money spinner and Facebook now has enough
people on who keep it open during the day that they could get a large amount
of traffic from people who aren't as interested in the different ways search
results can be generated and aren't that fussed. With their database of
places, events, venues and so on they'd probably have very interesting results
for a specific set of information, and I imagine being able to get into that
result set would be worth a decent amount of some groups. It's straightforward
business but with some serious amount of backend work going, I imagine if we
start seeing Facebook staff up rapidly it might signal they're going for it.

I said payments down the stack, I'll quickly justify. Facebook's biggest
problem right now is getting people to trust them as a mechanism, they've had
a few scandals that have trickled into the mainstream media from privacy
options, companies forcing handover of login details and so on, which erodes
the trust-base of users slightly which isn't a great start for a payment
service.

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PanMan
I wonder how easy (or mostly not-easy) it would be for Facebook to build a
search engine: While Facebook have some smart people (and part of the data
already), I think Google has more people working on search, than facebook has
altogether. And while Google makes it look easy, building a good search engine
is not an easy thing. Look at how much Bing spends.

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manuelflara
They should buy DuckDuckGo and turn it into "Facebook Search". If that
happens, though, say goodbye to "unbiased, unfiltered search results" :-)

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Zirro
Since DDG uses results from other search engines, and one of their main
selling points is the "unbiased, unfiltered search results", I fail to see
what Facebook would be buying in that case.

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NolF
DDG has its own index, you get offered bing/google when there is too few
results from DDG. Even when you click bing/google, it is anonymized, so the
results are not skewed by the info the search engines have on you.

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rurounijones
Entering China? I thought the censorship and other legal ramifications of
doing that would cripple a western based social network.

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nicholassmith
I think it depends on how much they're willing to concede to the Chinese
government. If they build it essentially as an island in the rest of the
network they might get away with it, it just depends whether Facebook think
they'll get a lot of traction for it to be worth doing.

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mtrimpe
Whenever I think of Facebook's monetization strategies all I can think of is
payment service, payment service, payment service, payment service.

Having payment details and a _verified identity_ would massively increase the
value of Facebook's user profiles and the low-friction payment they could
offer would be an invaluable asset.

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001sky
I think the intersting play is to seach data on FB, which is a different kind
of search than Google. ie, ask FB for XYZ slices of data it already has. more
like a database query than a www-crawl. the upside for FB here is that just by
asking, you've created a situtaion where intent can be inferred. thus, serving
them up some targeted ads makes sense. This is a big step for them in solving
a problem--not ruining the "social" bit of FB browsing--and that is really the
key point. You're just creating a new class of behaviour, that complements an
existing one.

