Facebook Closes Gift Shop and Introduces Like Button For Emails

Facebook Closes Gift Shop and Introduces Like Button For Emails

Facebook has succeeded in a lot of things. They've gone from nothing to become the largest online phenomenon with over 750 million regular users. You can't win them all though. Alongside their dismal advertising campaign goes there "Gift Shop". You may remember this from when it is the birthday of a friend and it asks you to send a virtual present for a small sum.

It's officially closing down on August 1st and Facebook says it's so that they can concentrate on improving other products. If you have received a gift, you will still have that on your page as you have paid for it but from the deadline you cannot send them any longer. You get the feeling that this might be their way of saying "We didn't move mountains with this one, so we're letting it go".

Since its 2007 launch, it never really kicked off despite the cheap price of $1 per item and selection of dozens of presents. You can still use 3rd party apps within Facebook to give and receive gifts from friends. This is another reason it didn't hit off so well. Why pay when you have free?

On the other hand, it's widely considered that the gift shop would need little maintenance and the money earned from it would be "pure profit" and so closing it down is like throwing away money. People will always remember the Gift Shop which was one of the first ways Facebook monetized the site in its early days but after introducing other streams, it's time to see it go.

In other related news, Facebook is set to introduce a feature which will allow you to "like" an email. Created by MailChimp, an email marketing service, it's due for release early next week. It could really change email marketing which at this point has a slightly shady undertone. If people saw that an email had been liked by 200 people they might click it and not delete it. This would make sure the best content got through and the worse was filtered out naturally.

When a "like" button is pressed by someone receiving the email, it will be posted to their Facebook profile and the statistics of what is clicked and when can be accessed through the stats page on MailChimp. This will get mass coverage, especially if their link goes viral. Traffic can increase rapidly with a hot link. There has been no word as of yet whether a similar version for Twitter is going to be made by MailChimp but with the forecasted success of this feature it shouldn't be too long.

Stats show that nearly 65 million users "like" something every day. For comparison, that's about once a day for every person who lives in the UK. If it works like it should, it will start engaging the recipient of emails in the process and make them feel more involved.

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