I wrote a blog post about this yesterday, but alas, I lost it. CNN has an article about Facebook’s virtual currency plans, which are already moving into alpha.
Facebook is researching the idea of creating a unified currency but is “very early” in the process and has not committed to it, the site said in a statement to CNN.
Currently, applications on the site — which allow users to play games with each other and trade gifts — are powered by currencies made by the application’s developers, not by Facebook.
These developers are making good money on the system, and Facebook is missing out on profits in that area, said Hudson, of the Virtual Goods Summit.
— ‘Virtual currencies’ power social networks, online games – CNN.com.
Now, Facebook already has a virtual currency — credits — which you use to buy gifts. But what is being talked about is opening up an API to their currency system through apps.
For those who haven’t noticed, the open APIs Facebook is creating are allowing access to data such as login from anywhere on the Net. So in effect, this could lead to a fairly standard currency fo any site that accepts Facebook logins.
The real play here, as Information Week notes, is to become a “gold standard” of sorts, similar to the way in which Facebook and LinkedIn are already becoming stronger standards for online identity than OpenID is (the flip side is, of course, than you can now use OpenId to log into Facebook!).
The notion of “customer ownership” starts getting very blurry in a world like this. It won’t be long until you see major MMORPGs allowing you to log in with social networking credentials rather than requiring you to create their own account (we at Metaplace already allow this). And if these currency plans move forward and go far enough, we could see many users just paying their subs or their microtransactions with Facebook credits.
For smaller apps and websites, this can make a great deal of sense. Lots of other players are trying to establish base virtual currencies that work across sites and apps.