Inside Facebook

Since Facebook recently started testing its new Facebook Credits payment system with three applications, there’s been a lot of interest from developers in trying out the new service. Although Facebook isn’t taking signups at the moment, last night Facebook put out a notice letting developers know that they can go to this form to express their interest in participating in future tests.

We’ve heard a lot of developers are interested in learning more about the current Facebook Credits alpha test.  At the moment we are not accepting additional partners into the alpha, but we are collecting names of interested parties for potential future beta tests of this feature. If we test this feature further, we’ll be testing it with applications of varying user bases, business models, and functionalities – there is not one particular kind of application we would be looking for.

Please sign up here to register your interest: http://facebookcredits.questionpro.com/

Thanks,
The Facebook Platform Team

However, Facebook doesn’t make any indications of when exactly the test may open up to more developers in a closed “beta,” or when we will see a fully open launch.

As for the survey itself, most of the questions aren’t particularly revealing about the direction the system might be headed. However, the last does make a note about terminology:

Do you currently use the term “credits” in any of the applications you listed?

Facebook has been very strict about the use of terms that they see as linked to core features in an effort to limit the confusion of users between the site and applications that run on the platform. “Wall” and “poke”, for example, are forbidden terms and there are restrictions even on more common terms such as “message”, “status” and even “friend.” Could we see “credits” added to this list in the future? It seems possible, and developers of games with virtual currency systems may want to make a note of it.