I would love to see Etsy get in on this.
Facebook Gifts
101–110 of 119 posts
Re: Facebook Gifts
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such a convenient way to make an empty and meaningless gesture!
Why would that be empty and meaningless? Sure, it's not much effort, but it's nice to know someone was thinking of you. The fact that it's not free gives it more weight than a simple "Happy Birthday" post.
> Sure, it's not much effort
The greatest gift you can give someone is your time.
Re: Facebook Gifts
#103Oooh, now that's the way to get real names + addresses out of people. Neat. It also involves social pressure -- now not giving away your address will mean rejecting a gift.
Doing anything with addresses is risky from a legal and privacy perspective - I doubt facebook can get away with snailmail spam without permission, for example. Nor do I think they want to do that. For geographic targeting IPs and user-entered information are usually good enough. Also, as gsharma mentions, facebook has tons of geographic information on users from mobile, which is better because it reflects where you…
I've believed that building a payments platform is the road to riches for Facebook for a long time. They have such a headstart on the fraud and identity issue, and they have both the merchants via FB connect, and the customers (obviously).
Re: Facebook Gifts
#104Oooh, now that's the way to get real names + addresses out of people. Neat. It also involves social pressure -- now not giving away your address will mean rejecting a gift.
Not to mention those among us who may have been less than truthful about their birthdates. I swear, I really was born on 1/1/1970. I'm a epoch baby! Ok, maybe not.
If you lied to facebook about your birthdate, your friends will get incorrect birthday notifications from facebook. This surprises you why?
Re: Facebook Gifts
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
My google calendar reminds me of birthdays. Is it google who cares and not me?
You were pro-active and took steps to remember the birthdays by sticking them on your calendar. It's different from clicking on a link because Facebook remembered someone's birthday.
Why? Not many people remember many peoples' birthdays: I know that because of Facebook I don't need to proactively ask for and store most friends' birthdays because I'll be actively reminded of them.
Re: Facebook Gifts
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've reached the number of friends on Facebook where at least ONE person is having a birthday every day. I probably only post 10-15 "happy birthday!" posts a year. So every day I check to see who's birthday it is. If it's someone I'm close to, then I post something. If Facebook didn't have them displayed, I would probably have those 15 birthdays written down on a real world calendar, and I'd just check that.
Just a few more poorly measured statistics from me: I have 1200+ friends, have about 10-15 birthdays a week. Never post on their walls, don't have my birthday listed. Get maybe 10-15 wishes a year on my wall. Text/call about 10-15 people a year (not including family). Before I removed my birthday, I had about 700 friends and would get around 100 wall posts. Going to try an experiment where I make a random day my birt…
Yeah, I have seen people do this, definitely will get a lot of messages still. Facebook limits the amount of times you can change your birthday, likely because of this.
Re: Facebook Gifts
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not thinking of you because Facebook had to remind them. Try making your birthday private in Facebook one year and see how many happy birthday messages you get when people aren't prodded by Facebook to care. It's a lot less.
That doesn't mean that people don't care. I certainly wouldn't able to remember the birthday of all my closest friends, but I do care and am glad to be reminded. On the other hand, there are of course a ton of bday wishes from people who probably don't really care, but is that really a bad thing?
Yeah, I think you can be reasonably good friends with someone and not remember their birthday. Unless you are really focusing on it you are going to have a limited bandwidth for remembering birthdays and likely have more people you genuinely care about sending your best wishes than you can remember.
Re: Facebook Gifts
#108May be Facebook will open it's 'Gifts market place' to finely-tested eCommerce businesses through an API!!
This is more meaningful, because Facebook doesn't want to be an eCommerce company. It's vision is connecting the world. And it makes more sense to open the platform to external businesses which are tested for 'great experience'. In this way Facebook itself will not have to be another eCommerce company and it can have just enough control, share and work over the platform.
Re: Facebook Gifts
#109Oooh, now that's the way to get real names + addresses out of people. Neat. It also involves social pressure -- now not giving away your address will mean rejecting a gift.
Doing anything with addresses is risky from a legal and privacy perspective - I doubt facebook can get away with snailmail spam without permission, for example. Nor do I think they want to do that. For geographic targeting IPs and user-entered information are usually good enough. Also, as gsharma mentions, facebook has tons of geographic information on users from mobile, which is better because it reflects where you…
FB doesn't want real names and addresses so they can start sending out snailmail spam, they want them so that they can start user matching with advertising partners' CRM databases.
Re: Facebook Gifts
#110I don't see anyone else mentioning this, but this is probably the rebranded version of this year's acquisition, Karma Science.