
Facebook brings in payment system - gibsonf1
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2adf1976-4f91-11de-a692-00144feabdc0.html
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mediaman
This is powerful, and I believe that the revenue stream will ultimately make
up far more than one third of the firm's total sales as the article suggests.

Peer to peer commerce relies heavily on social networks to guarantee quality
of goods, delivery, and payment. Taking the social graph of FB and layering
its own payment system would allow a big opportunity for improvement in peer
to peer commerce. Imagine that you need to buy a used item, say a couch, but
like many people you're concerned about buying from a random person on
Craigslist. With this, you could search for a couch among your social network
plus one or two degrees, and FB would take care of payment. The quality of
purchase would be supported by the existing physical social network outside of
FB, but mapped out inside FB.

Honestly, I could see this becoming a major competitor, at least in some
respects, to what eBay was supposed to do but has started to ignore (peer to
peer auctions).

Much more exciting to observe than them trying to monetize ad space.

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iseff
Most surprising quote of the article (IMO): "Zynga, the largest applications
developer on Facebook, with 42m users of its games, is reported to be nearing
annual sales of $100m. Together, developers working on Facebook’s platform are
expected to make more than $500m this year – perhaps more than Facebook
itself."

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run4yourlives
I suppose it's a step in the right direction, but I don't see this helping in
terms of monetizing the vast majority of facebook users.

There does seem to be a core group that love the little games and such. I'm
sure those people will pay something. What I struggle with though is how big
of FB's user base this core group is, and how stable it will remain.

I remain pessimistic.

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Fuca
Good Move, that should end the questions about money in fb.

