Facebook Platform Breeds a Competitor
Facebook is seeing the first sides of its own Facebook platform working against it. Facebook Platform, as you recall, is the service that allows anyone to build their own application to be embedded in Facebook profiles. It was only a matter of time before someone built an application to replace Facebook’s own services, and the first one to be popular has arrived.
Facebook has a stupid little Gifts application, where you pay $1 to send someone a little picture. Now, someone has duplicated that functionality in an application called Gifts Should Be Free.
It has all the same post-little-pictures-to-your-profile functionality but, as you may have guessed, it’s free. Why would anyone pay $1 for a gift when they can go to an application that does the exact same thing for free? The application currently has over 600,000 users and its membership growing rapidly.
Now arises a big ethical question for Facebook: Will it let a competitor use Facebook resources to grow? Or will it begin censoring platform applications?
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It’s very stupid of Facebook to let people pay for the gift. Were people really paying for them? I think they just used the one they get free and that’s it. The free gift appliciation is gonna increase its users unless Facebook does something about it.
eh. i thought those little stamp-like pictures were free to start with.
first knew about this function when i saw a friend’s profile had this penguin displaying like it was a prize winner when i thought i could have google-imaged something better.
Yes I have seen many people who get fooled by these stuff on the Internet. People have really bought gifts on facebook.
It depends whether they’re happy to open it up to market forces (and most likely start to anger people), or police it to keep everything free…