Developers told that Facebook Credits are imminent
Sunday 28 February 2010 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter
A blog post Thursday on the Facebook Developers site announced that the social networking giant's virtual currency, Facebook Credits, is near to its official launch.
In the post, Deborah Liu, a product marketer on the Facebook Developer Network team, explains the thinking behind the Facebook Credits concept:
"The long-term goal of Facebook Credits is to provide a currency that makes purchasing virtual items across applications fast and simple. To make it easy to buy Facebook Credits we support several different credit cards, fifteen currencies, mobile payments, and now, PayPal. For developers, this translates into more people ready to spend, each with a higher likelihood of completing purchases."
Liu goes on to say that several large developers - including Crowdstar, Playdom, Playfish, RockYou, 6waves, and Zynga - have been added to the Facebook Credits programme during the past few months and that the company plans to bring more developers on board as the beta phase of testing now gets underway. Facebook's announcement last week that it will partner PayPal, owned by eBay, shows that its strategy has changed markedly from a few years back, when it was planning a rival to PayPal.
In excess of half a million applications exist on Facebook, and the virtual goods within those apps - especially games - have become increasingly popular with users. Facebook aims to make transactions easier by providing a single, cross-application currency, leading to a higher conversion rate for developers.
Industry sources suggest that Facebook will formally launch the credits - which have been actively tested by selected developers for over six months - at the F8 developer conference in San Francisco on April 21 and 22. The reaction of developers may not be what Facebook is hoping for, however. There is some indignation at Facebook's decision to award itself a generous 30 percent cut of all transactions. With many third-party currencies already inundating the developer platform, there are other options out there for developers, but Gosh! Media suspects that Facebook is not overestimating its pulling power.
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