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Seriously? Ads?

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Re: Seriously? Ads?

#221

Post by stickfigure »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #219
stickfigure wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the business proposition was simply "make another Visa" then sure, the proposition would be uninteresting. On the other hand, 2-3% of that $4 trillion is being consumed by the payment processing chain. Only a portion of it goes to Visa; the rest presumably go to banks and other layers of the service. Facebook potentially could, by virtue of being a trusted holder of identity worldwide, subsume all layers of this c…

2-3% isn't a dead weight loss, it's paying for very valuable things, especially fraud protection. You can't just magic it away. Also, as I said, if facebook wants to step into the payments middle man role (which they could) they could maybe make as much as Visa does. If they completely reinvented themselves and turned into a global merchant bank AND managed to convince at least a tenth of all merchant account holders…

Fraud is a massive problem in the existing payment system only because the architecture is horribly broken. The trust model is completely wrong. Nobody would design this system; we tolerate it only because of inertia, and because merchants are contractually required to hide these fees from customers. There's also an enormous regulatory burden to overcome. I'm not saying there still isn't a fraud issue, but it could be cut to a tenth just by changing the trust model.

My point is that Facebook is in a position to try building a new system, and the payoff is potentially enormous. Having a definition of identity that extends beyond a name and a cc# goes a long ways towards limiting fraud.

However, I tend to agree with you as far as Facebook's technical competence. This doesn't mean they shouldn't try.

As far as the chicken-and-egg problem goes, FB might do well to bootstrap a payments system in lesser-developed nations where Visa & Mastercard don't have such a lock on the market. A truly global payments system stands a good chance of eventually winning.

Re: Seriously? Ads?

#222

Post by sanxiyn »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #158
sanxiyn wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are working on it. http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Autocomplete_Types

One problem, though, is that banks and merchants tend to flag the credit-card field as "Never autocomplete, even if the user has explicitly requested otherwise." Any tool that actually solves the problem, at least from my perspective, is going to have to give me the option to ignore whatever security conventions are built into the standard(s).

I think it is reasonable to demand not to autocomplete on the server side. Do they really demand not to autocomplete on the client side? In x-autocompletetype case, all CC information stays in the browser, only thing server does is to mark "this is CC field".

Re: Seriously? Ads?

#223

Post by jcmhn »

mtts wrote: post #71
jurre wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your parent was being sarcastic. We need a sarcasm tag in HTML.

I was aware of that. But parent did raise an interesting point. Google Wallet isn't doing too great. Why?

> Google Wallet isn't doing too great. Why?

No support. You NEED to be able to reach a human being to clear up problems with credit cards.

I used google wallet to pay for a google apps yearly account. I also used a different card to pay for a couple games from the android market.

I dutifully checked all the options to make sure that the card I used to pay for those games could never ever be used to pay the renewal fee on the the apps account. Then one day I found that the wrong card had been charged for the apps renewal. I couldn't get ahold of anyone at google. I couldn't find any help online. I couldn't even find a phone number to call.

So I removed the cards from my wallet account. Cancelled the wallet account, and snarl "no" anytime google tries to get a credit card from me.

Re: Seriously? Ads?

#224

Post by mdwrigh2 »

jcmhn wrote: post #223
mtts wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was aware of that. But parent did raise an interesting point. Google Wallet isn't doing too great. Why?

> Google Wallet isn't doing too great. Why? No support. You NEED to be able to reach a human being to clear up problems with credit cards. I used google wallet to pay for a google apps yearly account. I also used a different card to pay for a couple games from the android market. I dutifully checked all the options to make sure that the card I used to pay for those games could never ever be used to pay the renewal fe…

Just as an fyi, a phone number does exist for wallet: support.google.com/wallet/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1350364

Re: Seriously? Ads?

#225

Post by rmc »

m0shen wrote: post #127
rmc wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an irony/snark/sarcasm punctuation symbol in English: ⸮ cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

I'm not sure why, but the mark you posted doesn't work for me, but these work from wikipedia, sarcasm mark: ¡ , irony mark: ؟

Both display fine for me on Chromium on Ubuntu. But on HTC Desire Android phone, I can't see my original, but can see your ones.

Yay! Unicode! Encoding! Fun!

Re: Seriously? Ads?

#226

Post by FiloSottile »

Well, it would be GREAT also on mobile! All my friends have Facebook, if I could pay them with my phone and only their name I would do it all the time. (Like what PayPal tries to do, but there is not enough adoption)

Re: Seriously? Ads?

#227

Post by smsm42 »

batista wrote: post #187
smsm42 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please provide a link to the report? 50% click rate is insanely high, nobody has that. It would be very interesting to know how Facebook achieved such miraculous performance.

> Could you please provide a link to the report? 50% click rate is insanely high, nobody has that. It would be very interesting to know how Facebook achieved such miraculous performance. He is not talking about 50% click rate. That is, he's not talking about 1 ad. He says that 50% of FB users have clicked on ads at some point in their FB use. Which might, or might not be true, but is not the same as "50% click rate".

Oh, you mean 50% of people that ever opened facebook have clicked on some ad at least once? Then it's not a very useful number - so suppose I clicked on some ad 5 years ago and since then never even logged in to FB - what use is to count that? I'd assume a useful number would be the number of active users regularly clicking on ads... IMHO 50% would be very high number then (unless you define regularly as "at least once in 5 years" :)

Re: Seriously? Ads?

#228

Post by iamgilesbowkett »

chrisrhoden wrote: post #135
iamgilesbowkett wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the sheer number of possible answers is overwhelming, but pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email. (I can't be the only one who's afraid to find out what their cars are like.) so I'm going to say the reason Google Wallet failed is because it was neither search nor email. I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple is…

Woah. Google Wallet failed because they didn't already have accounts for everyone when they launched it. Paypal was the only competitor but they didn't offer anything paypal didn't already offer, and everyone was already on paypal. > pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email. I can see that you're having some difficulty with google recently, but you can't actually believe this. What about…

Calendar is worthless. Maps you have a point. Android is a joke.

Re: Seriously? Ads?

#229

Post by iamgilesbowkett »

aychedee wrote: post #181
iamgilesbowkett wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the sheer number of possible answers is overwhelming, but pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email. (I can't be the only one who's afraid to find out what their cars are like.) so I'm going to say the reason Google Wallet failed is because it was neither search nor email. I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple is…

Android is a success. It is the new dominant commodity operating system.

LOL
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