Posts tagged as:

virtual gifts

Facebook Birthday Email Alerts Squashes Fellow Apps

by Jason Wilk on November 16, 2008

Facebook began its e-mail birthday reminder service to help remind you of birthdays coming up.
This is bad news for a couple of applications on the Facebook Platform that do the exact samme thing; Birthday Alert has over 180K users and Birthday Reminder has over 2M users.
It was worth it for Facebook to kill these apps. They will be able to make solid revenue off of pushing virtual gifts, e-cards, photo albums and more.
Facebook has clearly given up on their failing marketplace and any ethical decisions rergarding whether or not to take on lucrative apps is out the window. Facebook music will be the next big hijack.

by Jason Wilk on November 8, 2008

MySpace COO Amit Kapur revealed at the Web 2.0 Summit that they are working on their own own virtual gift service as well as a payment system that MySpcae App developers can add to their offering.
The virtual gifts thing is a no brainer, but the payment system will be interesting. Does it mean developers will be creating apps that are good enough to charge for? Or does the payment system mean they will have an in-house ecommerce infrastructure for rolling out their own Merchandise, Concert Tickets, and Ringtones applications that are supposedly coming soon. I think the latter.