Facebook, which has been testing giving its Gifts application more prominence on friends’ profiles before their birthdays recently, has just launched another new Gifts feature: scheduled birthday gifts.
With scheduled gifts, you can buy Facebook gifts for your friends whose birthdays are coming up ahead of time – but Facebook won’t actually “deliver” the gift to your friend’s wall until their actual birthday.
Interestingly, however, other friends will be able to see that you are giving a birthday gift before the recipient’s birthday – perhaps a move by Facebook to subtly increase the social pressure on others to give a Facebook Gift as well.
Virtual gifts are an increasingly important revenue stream for Facebook. After doing an estimated $30-40 million in virtual gifts last year, the company changed its currency system from dollars to virtual credits in November. Given all the work the company has done to push birthday virtual gift giving, Facebook’s virtual gifts revenues should substantially increase this year.
Several Facebook application developers are focued on the birthday gifting market as well, including SocialCalendar (in depth profile), with over 2 million monthly active users, and Birthday Calendar, which sports over 10 million monthly active users.
A new chain letter has hit the tipping point on Facebook in recent days called “25 Random Things About Me.” It’s one of the largest cases of chain letters being forwarded through Facebook using Facebook Notes we’ve seen to date.
While Facebook can’t pinpoint exactly when the chain started, a Facebook spokesperson told Inside Facebook that:
- The number of total Facebook Notes created per day has increased over 100% in the last week
- The number of people tagged in Facebook Notes per day has increased 5x in the last week
Here’s how the chain letter works: the above instructions, which accompany the 25 things being shared, ask recipients to write up their own “25 Random Things About Me” Note and “tag” 25 of their Facebook friends in it.
While chain letters have been around since at least the 19th century, the use of Facebook Notes as a channel for one-to-many forwarding is still relatively uncommon compared to popular content sharing Facebook applications and even email.
However, as with any new communication tool, the social rules around Facebook Note tagging are still being defined:
Facebook is testing a major update to its FBJS JavaScript spec called FBJS2 that should make FBJS both easier to learn and maintain. Essentially, FBJS2 uses more standard JavaScript syntax than the original version.
As Facebook’s Marcel Georges Laverdet writes,
Today we are announcing a preview of a major update to FBJS. We’re calling this FBJS2. We’ve completely rewritten FBJS from the ground-up to make it much more natural for Javascript developers – now you will be able to use more standard Javascript syntax and no longer be required to use proprietary function-based getters and setters. With FBJS2, old FBJS-specific code such as this.setStyle('display', 'block') can now be written with portable JavaScript as this.style.display = 'block', for example.
We expect all of your original FBJS code to continue to work with the new FBJS2 libraries. We’ve created a new layer that implements all the original interfaces of FBJS under the context of FBJS2. If you are currently using FBJS, you should not need to make any changes to your applications to support this release. However, we still encourage you to port your applications to FBJS2 once it goes live to simplify your development using more standard Javascript syntax and for future benefits.
Laverdet says Facebook is planning on releasing FBJS to the live site within 4-6 weeks pending developer feedback. The original FBJS should still be fully supported, but as Laverdet says, Facebook will be encouraging developers to use FBJS2 once it goes live. To view your apps in the FBJS2 sandbox, click here.
As Facebook prepares to transition control of the Marketplace classifieds application, which it created in 2007, to new partner Oodle, the Facebook Platform team has announced that the Marketplace APIs will be deprecated on March 3, 2009.
Back in December, Facebook announced that it has partnered with classifieds service Oodle to power a new version of the Marketplace application. Unlike other applications developed in house by Facebook – like Photos or Events – Marketplace never gained widespread adoption. While Facebook Photos and Facebook Events are more tightly integrated with users’ friends, Marketplace was primarily organized around Networks.
Oodle’s new service may launch as soon as next month, at which point new developer APIs may be available. “We hope to offer improved APIs and functionality at some point in the future,” the Facebook Platform team says.
