Facebook Rolls Out Social Gifting To U.S. Users

[engine]

Here comes the start of Facebook ecommerce and shopping.

Continuing the charge to ramp up its social gifting product well into the holiday season, Facebook on Tuesday announced the wide roll-out of Gifts to Facebook users in the United States.

Previously the product was in a limited invite only mode, slowly spreading across the site user-by-user.Facebook Rolls Out Social Gifting To U.S. Users [allthingsd.com]

Currently, most of Facebook’s gifting options are food and lifestyle related, including cookies and cupcakes, stuffed animals and other relatively low-cost items.

But Tuesday’s wide Gifts roll-out also comes with another gifting option: Wine. And lots of it. Facebook has partnered with 16 different wine makers, letting folks send each other bottles of red and white over the network.

[Tonearm]

So it's another interface to your store like eBay or Amazon? Sounds like a great thing.

[StoutFiles]

Sounds like a privacy problem. If I send a gift to X, I have to give Facebook their mailing address. Now they have their mailing address along with their likes/dislikes, and can sell that info to corporations to accurately spam their mailbox.

[Tonearm]

You don't care about privacy, you're on Facebook! :)

[lucy24]

Ooh, excellent. Another way for the under-thirteen set to get their hands on alcohol.

[raijen]

StoutFiles, actually you don't have to have the person's address. You order and pay, and then FB sends a notification to the giftee and actually gets the address directly from them. If they don't really like the gift, they can even choose something different of equal value. One of my customers is one of the companies partnered with FB - the orders are coming in slowly, but they are getting some.