This is powerful, and I believe that the revenue stream will ultimately make up far more than one third of the firm's total sales as the article suggests.
Peer to peer commerce relies heavily on social networks to guarantee quality of goods, delivery, and payment. Taking the social graph of FB and layering its own payment system would allow a big opportunity for improvement in peer to peer commerce. Imagine that you need to buy a used item, say a couch, but like many people you're concerned about buying from a random person on Craigslist. With this, you could search for a couch among your social network plus one or two degrees, and FB would take care of payment. The quality of purchase would be supported by the existing physical social network outside of FB, but mapped out inside FB.
Honestly, I could see this becoming a major competitor, at least in some respects, to what eBay was supposed to do but has started to ignore (peer to peer auctions).
Much more exciting to observe than them trying to monetize ad space.
Most surprising quote of the article (IMO):
"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."
I suppose it's a step in the right direction, but I don't see this helping in terms of monetizing the vast majority of facebook users.
There does seem to be a core group that love the little games and such. I'm sure those people will pay something. What I struggle with though is how big of FB's user base this core group is, and how stable it will remain.
Peer to peer commerce relies heavily on social networks to guarantee quality of goods, delivery, and payment. Taking the social graph of FB and layering its own payment system would allow a big opportunity for improvement in peer to peer commerce. Imagine that you need to buy a used item, say a couch, but like many people you're concerned about buying from a random person on Craigslist. With this, you could search for a couch among your social network plus one or two degrees, and FB would take care of payment. The quality of purchase would be supported by the existing physical social network outside of FB, but mapped out inside FB.
Honestly, I could see this becoming a major competitor, at least in some respects, to what eBay was supposed to do but has started to ignore (peer to peer auctions).
Much more exciting to observe than them trying to monetize ad space.