Facebook streamlines gifts

Facebook has recently re-vamped their virtual gift platform, adding more choice, quality and interactivity in the lead-up to a full financial platform launch.

Facebook Credits have been around for a few years, but recently, Facebook announced changes to the credits platform and introduced more connectivity with Facebook Connect, used on over 80,000 popular sites and growing.  This new credits platform is essentially a direct competitor to Paypal.  By assuring your real identity, and with verification like mobile devices, PINs, emails, etc, Facebook Connect will soon become 'the way to pay' online. 

The virtual gifts on Facebook.com are just the appetizer to Facebook's $500mil+ revenue model, based mostly on socially-targeted ads. However as Facebook Connect becomes a flow-through conduit for currency internationally, they will rapidly become an

go-to payment platform. Why would someone like my mom create a new account with PayPal, go through the security and verification process, etc to make a payment on various sites around the web, when she can use credentials that she knows and trusts, via Facebook Connect.

As the Facebook Credits system permeates the web, and Facebook Connect becomes even more ubiquitous, I think we'll see many of the same things we saw PayPal struggle with 10 years ago

for Facebook.  Even though Facebook appears to lack

experience with e-commerce, the reality is that their platform for taking our money to create social-ads (for both large and small businesses) is quite robust.

I will also speculate that one of Facebook's upcoming acquisitions in 2010 or early 2011 will be Financial or Analytical.  A payments gateway, a startup with some new, great ecommerce wares... Something like that.