Home Facebook Experimenting With Credits For Outside Websites

Facebook Experimenting With Credits For Outside Websites

On October 21, the Facebook Developer blog announced that it had started working with “a few developers to test the ability to offer Facebook Credits on websites, with the goal of helping them offer a more unified app experience to users beyond apps on Facebook.” Their preliminary Facebook Credits test uses the games UNO Boost and Collapse! Blast on Gamehouse.

Currently, Facebook Credits is the required payment method for Facebook apps. Facebook Credits became available as a payment option on mobile apps except for native iPhone or iPad apps. The e-commerce space is still up for grabs, ripe for fresh battles between Facebook and Apple.

Facebook and Gamehouse will keep an eye out to see how players react, which will determine how the Facebook Credits experiment will proceed. On Gamehouse, users signed in through Facebook will only have the option to pay with Credits; if not, they’ll be able to pay through their usual methods of credit card or PayPal. This could skew the experiment a bit, angering some users who would prefer to stay logged in through Facebook yet pay through another method.

Right now, Gamehouse will still have to share 30 percent revenue from the sale of Facebook Credits. This is the same cut that Apple’s App Store takes from developers who submit apps and games, and also the same as the Amazon Appstore.

Why Won’t Facebook Allow Credits on Their Native App?

At last week’s Web 2.0 conference, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said “A few years from now, most every single person at Facebook is going to be working on mobile.”

Yet when the Facebook Developer blog announced Facebook Credits for mobile the other week, it said that Facebook Credits would go mobile, but not on iOS. Using them on iOS would violate Apple’s in-app purchasing rules. Still, very few iPad users will use the mobile website (m.facebook.com) entirely just because that’s where their Facebook Credits are.

If Facebook won’t allow its users to use Facebook Credits on the native iPhone or iPad apps, and the future is in mobile, how will Facebook Credits be able to grow?

Will Facebook Credits Become a Global Currency System?

Back in July 2010, we noted that Facebook was “standing at the food of a virtual cash mountain.” That’s when Facebook first expanded the Facebook Credits program out of beta, rolling out a path that could amount to the world’s first global currency. Nearly a year later,

on July 1, all game developers were required to use Facebook Credits, reports AllFacebook.com.

If the Facebook/Gamehouse experiment succeeds, will this mark the beginning of Facebook’s entry into building a micro-currency around its application platform?

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