At least that’s what all the signs seem to be indicating. I’ve been trying to watch the evolution of online social network payments fairly closely as eCommerce is something near and dear to my heart. Being an entrepreneur, the next cutting edge area of eCommerce is of particular interest, and social networks is definitely one of them.
For a while I thought Twitter would be a great place to harness online payments tied to social networking. However, after a number of recent posts, some of which did highlight the monetization of Twitter in a positive light, others had a very negative outlook (frankly, with more merit). Does that mean that Twitter is hopeless for this ecommerce type transactions? Not at all.
What I did notice, however, is that eyes should really be turned to Facebook. I make this assumption based on the fact that the CTO of TipJoy, a company based on being able to make small payments across Twitter, turned down potential acquisitions to go work for Facebook. Specifically, he will most likely be working on a Facebook Payments type system.
Facebook has an audience of some 220 million people, stability, and has shown given its recent acquisitions, large API updates, and new features, that it’s still hungry and in the game. As such, I’ll probably be considering more Facebook applications then Twitter (it seems like twitter is losing a lot of its free marketing steam).