
Hacked Screenshots Show Friend-To-Friend Payments Feature in Facebook Messenger - whbk
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/05/pay-with-facebook-messenger/
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SchizoDuckie
The first thing I thought when reading the headline was:

Yeah, let's give the most intrusive facebook app ever access to creditcard
details wcgw!

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evv
How is the app overly intrusive?

I doubt average the average facebook user feels that way

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minimaxir
You missed the outrage when Facebook forced users to switch to Messager:
[http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/08/facebook-messenger-
pr...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/08/facebook-messenger-privacy-
fears-heres-what-you-need-to-know/)

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eli
Given how important Facebook is to so many people (plus just the sheer size of
its userbase) I literally do not think it is possible for them to make any
changes whatsoever that do not provoke some sort of backlash. If they merged
Messenger back into the main app there would certainly be an uproar over that
as well.

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veermishra0803
A friend to friend payment system in facebook messenger is a killer. Now i
want to see what will be the move of all the p2p money sending apps, as many
are coming up with it here in India. Excited to test it.

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wellboy
This is huge. Social payments could be the biggest business model for Facebook
and even blast their revenues way past $100B. Lots of startups, many great
ones have attempted it before, but all failed due to lack of traction.
Facebook doesn't have this problem and could thus bring social payments
finally to success.

This is where we will now be able to see how much TRUST affects a company. The
Facebook brand is currently viewed as very negative and could be the reason,
why this business model could be completely rejected by its users.

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onedev
To your point, PayPal is also seen as a very negative brand and they continue
to thrive.

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likethebird
The question I have is if this is an attempt to take away PayPal's market or
add to it...that is unclear to me. If you've done a boosted post or an
advertisement on facebook, you know you can pay via PayPal. I, for one, won't
enter a credit or debit card but would do this if I could link it to Pp.

...but then again, it is not often I owe my friends money.

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camillomiller
This strikes me more as a tentative to increase users-value by coming out with
cool stuff that would tie them to a credit card.

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hendzen
I kind of would expect them to acquire Venmo before trying to build this.
Venmo already has a lot of traction in this area.

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rory096
Venmo is already owned by Braintree, which is owned by PayPal.

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hendzen
I wasn't aware of that actually. Seems like everyone I know is using Venmo
already - including having it linked to their bank accounts. Not sure I would
trust FB with my bank information.

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Mandatum
Would like an open standard defined for bank account integration.
Unfortunately that's unlikely to happen given the mass amounts of banks and
their relationship with credit-card companies. (ie Why implement bank-to-bank
transfers where there's no margin to be made in comparison to credit-cards?)

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bruceboughton
In the UK we have recently standardised on PayM for mobile transfers keyed by
phone number. It's actually pretty good. Barclays PingIt was the earlier
player here.

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icpmacdo
Im excited for this. When hanging out with friends we will often get a pizza
or something of that nature but it is always determined by who has cash on
them, its not going to be a hassle anymore reimbursing them to the exact penny
for each persons share because they are all in the FB ecosystem.

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ztnewman
Because there aren't dozens of other ways to do this already..

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icpmacdo
> because they are all in the FB ecosystem

Ya dozens of app's to make them install or I could let them know about a
feature on an app that every single person I am friends with uses.

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tvhiggins
As long as all these new payment platforms like this, apple pay, and square
use credit cards, i don't really consider them that innovative. different way
to skin the same cat.

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kylelibra
Good lesson to remind my developers to stop putting WIP of unannounced
features in release builds.

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pyre
Depends. Maybe the production version is used for testing the feature, but is
only enabled for certain users.

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kylelibra
Good point, I hadn't considered that. Made the comment mainly because we had
an incident a few weeks back where a client saw a bunch of stuff in a
production version that was definitely never supposed to see the light of day
and put us in a very awkward position.

