Beetje off topic, maar daarom niet minder interessant. Op Hyves kun je nog niet met virtueel geld betalen, maar op Facebook en Hi5 wel. Dat kondigden de bedrijven los van elkaar kondigden aan. Gebruikers van deze profielensites kunnen met een soort monopoliegeld betalingen verrichten aan dienstenleveranciers op de site.
De Financial Times schrijft:
“(…) The long-rumoured payments system, which is in its early stages, will allow users to purchase Facebook “credits”, then use those credits to buy virtual goods from the third-party applications that run on the site, or from Facebook itself.
Facebook hopes that by offering a site-wide currency it will encourage more commerce on the website. By serving as the payment provider, it will capture a percentage of every transaction. (…)
Users are increasingly spending real money buying virtual goods and credits on the applications that run on Facebook’s platform. Zynga, the largest applications developer on Facebook, with 42m users of its games, is reported to be nearing annual sales of $100m. Together, developers working on Facebook’s platform are expected to make more than $500m this year – perhaps more than Facebook itself. (…)”
Anil Dharni, baas van productontwikkeling bij Hi5, doet via een OpenSocial-blog deze relevante aankondiging:
“(…) Over the last few weeks, hi5 has been launching our first third-party games integrated via OpenSocial-compliant APIs to our virtual currency platform – providing a standard payment method for developers to monetize their applications through our audience of over 60 million active users around the world. (…)
The next step was to make our payments interface OpenSocial compliant. In order to make our virtual currency more universal across hi5 and non-hi5 applications, our OpenSocial platform team collaborated with other containers to propose an OpenSocial Virtual Currency API as an extension to the OpenSocial specification. Our virtual currency interface was expedited due to the work started by other OpenSocial containers like Xiaonei.com, 51.com, and Netlog.com. With real use cases from Asia, Europe and Latin America, the containers quickly converged on the API specifications. (…)”
Foto: pingu1963 (cc)
