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Send Money with Paypal and Facebook

Send moneyPayPal has become pally with Facebook recently and you can now send money to people right from your Facebook site. All you need is your e-mail address and PayPal takes care of all the rest. Here is the link to the PayPal page within Facebook where you can get started.

It seems that Facebook is starting to get quite serious about its monetization. You can of course interact with Facebook financially right now, as you buy advertising space through their credit card portal, for example. They have been rumored for some time to have been looking at a “Facebook payments” program and it is only a matter of time before we start to see highly targeted and personalized advertisements appear on our Facebook homepages.

PayPal Send Money has a fan page on Facebook. This takes their level of customer service to another degree, as you can post your questions and concerns on the wall and receive a timely response from a PayPal employee. More and more people will be introduced to PayPal this way and they now allow money to be transferred to a total of 65 different countries around the world in 17 different currencies.

This development comes amid a rumor mill of Facebook versus PayPal stories circulating the web. When Facebook allowed some of its users to buy virtual and physical gifts through its new “gift shop,” this was seen as a direct shot against PayPal, still a leader in Internet based sales. The rumors were further fueled when Facebook hired Prashant Fuloria, one of the key designers of the Google Checkout platform, and other would-be PayPal competitors. Indeed, the biggest news appear to be that for the first time tangible gifts could be purchased through Facebook’s initiative, rather than just virtual gifts. Four developers were participating in the gift shop tests, including American Greetings Interactive, Greetbeatz, Somecards and Real Gifts, the latter providing physical gifts of candy or flowers.

The so called “alpha” test of the Facebook gift shop was said to be, by a Facebook spokesperson, simply a test “to explore possible new ways for users to share with their friends around birthdays and special occasions.” This latest news would appear to point toward a collaboration between PayPal and Facebook, rather than a direct competition. What was once termed to be a “PayPal killer” could in fact turn into a lucrative association for all parties. With 300 million monthly active users, Facebook could be poised to make significant income from a “Facebook payments” program. Meanwhile, Google Checkout remains curiously subdued in the background…

Matthew Toren

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