RT wallstCS: Recessionary Indicator: Steak Lunch with [Warren] Buffett Down ~78% YoY 2.1m v. 456,789 $$

Does anyone else still use the http://www.thefacebook.com url?

Danilo Quinonez Dear Facebook, I don’t want to become a fan of anything, it’s stupid, and stop asking! I’m not going to play into your plan of serving me useless ads, by being a fan of useless stuff. — Oh and that’s pretty funny that all you display is dating ads because of my ‘single’ status…Please find a more creative way to monetize; C’mon I know you can do it.

Facebook Testing Virtual Currency

Facebook is finally testing a virtual currency system called “credits,” an expansion of its virtual gifts market. If the feature is broadly rolled out across Facebook, you will be able to purchase “credits” (100 for $1, the way it’s set up now) and send them to your friends. They can then send them to other people as virtual “kudos” or use them to buy virtual gifts on Facebook.

This is the closest Facebook has come to building an on-site PayPal, except there is no way (yet?) to turn credits back into cash.

A fine start, but Facebook will probably have to extend the feature beyond “kudos” and gifts to make it more useful — such as using it as a payment system for classified ads, new Facebook features, in-app purchases, or for Facebook Connect sites.

It’s also possible this feature is too late. This would have been much more useful a year and a half ago when Facebook was trying to establish itself as a platform for third-party developers. Now that that’s dead, and Facebook is trying to turn itself into a sort-of Twitter-plus-photos, there’s fewer uses for currency.

Facebook’s virtual gifts business — estimated last year at $35 million annual run rate — isn’t nearly enough to support the company by itself. But the company is smart to milk it for as much revenue as possible: It’s a good side business, and having a secure, in-Facebook currency should help.

Facebook Testing Virtual Currency

Facebook Modifies New Homepage After Complaints

Facebook Inc. is making some minor modifications to its new homepage design, addressing griping from users who complained the weeks-old design made it more difficult to find information they care about.

Facebook Modifies New Homepage After Complaints - WSJ.com

Banks and Credit Unions on Twitter

If you haven’t been following Twitter the last few months, you may not realize it now has almost eight million monthly unique visitors according to Compete. That’s almost double the traffic it had just two months ago and a nearly a nine-fold gain from a year ago.

To put that traffic in perspective, it’s more than half that of the NY Times and slightly more than banking giant Wachovia (see Compete chart below).

Banking activity
Financial institutions are pretty new to the micro-blogging platform. In a search today, we found 13 U.S. banks and 14 credit unions with active Twitter feeds (see note 1). There were also and eight international banks for a total of 35.

See the table below for the non-inclusive list ranked by number of Twitter users that follow the bank’s feed (note 2). Wachovia (now owned by Wells Fargo), the only major bank that has promoted Twitter on its main website, leads with 2,000 followers (see previous post on Wachovia’s foray on to Twitter).

Opportunity  
Participating in Twitter is a low-cost entry into social media that can actually help save a customer relationship or three. Compared to blogging, it is much less labor intensive. It’s also less of a marketing platform given the 140-character limit in posts. But in the current environment, perhaps less truly is more. By all means, find a gung-ho Facebook devotee in your bank and let him or her get you into the Tweeting game .

NameTwitter URL (4)UpdatesFollowers1. Wachovia (Wells Fargo)/wachovia2572,0582. Bank of America/bofa_help5571,4863. Wells Fargo/wellsfargo4 (note 3)

548

—Via http://www.netbanker.com/2009/03/banks_and_credit_unions_on_twitter.html

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