Will Facebook kill the internet?

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Ian Byrne

In the nine years that Facebook has been around we’ve seen a ton of updates to what we can do on it. From live chatting (adios MSN Messenger ) to organising your “Gettin’ Slizzerd” birthday party, from uploading photos to tagging people in them, watching live sporting events, solving crimes etc. etc. etc.

The Give a Gift option is the latest add-on that entices users to transfer funds directly from their account into Mark Zuckerberg’s. Metaphorically of course (but not really). And it can only be the first in many such tweaks that the powers-that-be have planned to get that pesky share price to go up – get people to spend money on Facebook = very happy shareholders.

Facebook is big business for brands, or rather brands are big business for Facebook. But the one thing that’s been lacking is the option to easily and directly purchase products on it. Sure there are some f-commerce pages that you can buy directly from, but these are few and far between, and for the most part are crappy.

The integration of a clean shopping experience could make or break Facebook. It’s been on the fast track to becoming a legitimate advertising platform for some time now and the next logical step is to build in a buy option for brands.

Sure, ads were annoying at first, but does anybody really care that we’re being advertised to any more? We as consumers could be ripe for the plucking, and it could even sway the recent swell of negative public perception back in Facebook’s favour.

So what happens if Facebook nails it? We already perform so many of our online actions on it that shopping is pretty much the final frontier. Except for porn of course, but that’s a whole other blog post.

Ian is VP of 88 Creative. Follow him on Twitter @ianobyrno