Facebook gift shop to stop giving

As of August 1 2010, users will no longer be able to send and receive gifts from friends using the Facebook gift shop. Users however, will still be able to view gifts that they have both given and received, and for those that absolutely have to send a virtual gift, they are still able to do this by using third party applications such as Birthday Cards and Hallmark Social Calendar.

This recent announcement from social networking giant Facebook, will undoubtedly leave users with mixed feelings. Will they be saddened by the removal of the application that has been around since most of us joined Facebook? Everyone remembers the good old days where you could give and receive gifts with ease, and for free.  Or will feelings of relief overwhelm us as we realise that we will no longer have to fight our way past the “Give Amy a Gift” section that appears on her wall when all we wanted was to leave a quick message saying that we were thinking of her on her birthday.

Creators have decided that this once popular Facebook application is to be scrapped in order to focus time on developing the more popular features, such as the news feed, Photos, games and the Inbox. More energy has also been put into the growing popularity of the “Like” button, especially after it became a bit more than just a “Like” button when it replaced the “Become a fan” button on fan pages. Since then, the e-commerce world has been taken over by this social plugin, allowing users to “Like” a webpage that then shows up on their Facebook page.

smallbiztechnology.com reported that within the first 24 hours of Facebook announcing this new social plugin in April this year, users had “Liked” over a billion pages. This example of how new developments such as the Facebook “Like” plugin shows how important it is to continually engage in Social Media Optimisation (SMO).

Once again the fast paced changing world of eCommerce is realised. The question is though; will Facebook’s “Like” influence continue to grow and become the dominant force that marketers need to consider, or will it be replaced with another “the next big thing”, as was the case with the once very popular Facebook gift shop? The great thing is, is that in this online world, we won’t have to wait long to see what the answer will be.

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