Monday, August 01, 2011

Facebook Credits, the reserve currency of the future.

Facebook and Zynga are taking great strides in making social commerce a reality:

Because Facebook appears to favor Zynga more than other game developer, including through an unusual growth-target agreement, those two companies seem to be just about joined at the hip.

A year ago, Zynga’s chief executive Mark Pincus told employees that Zynga planned to expand beyond Facebook and start its own Zynga Live web site as a portal for its own social games. That never happened because Facebook cut the deal on Facebook Credits with Zynga.

Zynga already has enormous advantages over other developers on Facebook, with more than 264 million monthly active users on the social network, more than the top 15 other game companies combined.

If this partnership is a long-term cooperation game like the one Intel and Microsoft played in 1980-2000, Google will have a hard time catching up with this freight train. Facebook Credits represents a new transactions technology, which has a chance to become a platform for new commercial applications beyond games, e.g. video conferencing, content sales, etc. You can see Netflix's cooperation with Facebook as an example of a possible Zynga-like play in a different entertainment domain.

Can you finance a Facebook revolution with Facebook Credits? ;)

A couple of diagrams to illustrate the transition from social networking to social commerce.




tags: games, facebook, commerce, virtual, deontic, payload, platform, 4q diagram, social, control point, business model





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