We’re still in the early phases of Facebook’s build-out of the commerce side of its business, but it’s clear that between recent test launches of its payment service for developers, Facebook Credits virtual currency initiatives, and last week’s gift shop merchant program, Facebook is thinking a lot about the future of social commerce. Recently, the team hired Prashant Fuloria from Google to manage its payments initiatives, and the company is looking to hire more people to help run its e-commerce programs.

Two days ago, Peter Kafka at AllThingsD reported that before shutting down recently, social payment service TipJoy was in talks with a variety of potential acquirers. One was Facebook, who reportedly submitted a term sheet to buy the company before pulling out. Since then, co-founder Ivan Kirigin has since been hired by Facebook. The company confirms Kirigin is now working in an engineering role – we assume on payment products.

While some commenters initially criticized Facebook for hiring the co-founder of a company it had previously been in talks to acquire, Y Combinator founder and TipJoy investor Paul Graham stepped forward to publicly defend Facebook, saying TipJoy eventually ran out of money and that Kirigin “admired the hackers at Facebook” and wanted to work there.

Last week, on his fourth day of work at Facebook, Kirigin shared his thoughts on the future of social payments when he announced TipJoy was shutting down. Kirigin wrote,

We have decided against continuing to pursue additional funding. After a long and hard look at the market and the situation, we didn’t feel it made sense.

When we evaluate why there’s been so much hype about payments on Twitter, and yet so little traction for us (and even far less for our competitors) it is clear to us that the reason is that a 3rd party payment service doesn’t add enough value. We strongly believe that social payments will work on a social network, provided that they’re done within the platform and not as a 3rd party. “Simple, social payments” is *the* philosophy needed to do digital payments right, but once a service groks that, they need only to implement it on their own. We’ve been the thought leaders in this space, we see the hype and excitement, and yet we know very intimately the difficulties in gaining actual traction. The only way to get around this is for the platforms themselves to control payments – then all people wanting to operate on that platform would have to play along. We believe that a payments system directly and officially integrated into social networks such as Twitter and Facebook will be a huge success.

Does Facebook think the same way? While we don’t believe Facebook is building its own payment stack from scratch, we are hearing that Facebook is meeting with a variety of players in the payments industry about potential partnership opportunities.

We think that makes a lot of sense, and we believe it is likely Facebook will launch tests of new payment methods in the months ahead. Currently, Facebook only accepts major credit cards, while developers on the Facebook Platform are doing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues by accepting many types of direct payments, advertiser-financed offers, mobile payments, and pre-paid cards from users around the world.

It’s too early to tell exactly how more payment methods might be integrated into the Facebook Credit-buying user experience, but given that 70% of Facebook’s audience is outside the United States, it only makes sense for Facebook to make it easier for users to make purchases using whatever payment methods are available to them.