facebook: ready to monetise 200 million users?

With Mark Zuckerberg’s facebook passing the 200 million user mark, the question everyone has been asking is how does that convert to money?

It seems we may have found the answer to that. facebook is to get its own virtual currency, courtesy of card provider GroupCard. The service is designed to provide a cheap and easy payments portal for the site.

The “Pay with facebook” option answers the question many have asked about facebook monetisation, giving users a way of purchasing anything on the site for a very low fee.

The chance to sell to facebook’s population recently announced 200 million users - up from 150 million in January this year is bound to attract a lot of interest…

Social networking’s Holy Grail

Finding the way to earn revenue from the rapidly evolving social networking phenomenon has become the Holy Grail of marketers around the world. And it must be a source of embarrassment to our banks and everyone else in global financial circles that once again, the new kids on the block have thought of it first.

A new City in the Cloud ready to form?

I’ve long maintained that the future of business has found a new paradigm in a technology-driven Internet and that changes that began with the decline of traditional brick and mortar retail will move through banking very quickly.

It’s just a constant source of amazement to me that so many banking commentators are still clinging on to the debris of banking’s shipwreck and can’t see the dry land before them.

I’ve recently posted about payment sites like Billeo and Rudder and believe its only a matter of time before sites with an even close alignment to banking start to appear.

Once this happens, I believe we’ll start to see a banking implosion as the conventional banks start to break up into smaller units that can interface with this new medium. Leaving the rest to simply wither on the financial vine.

Don’t mourn the arrogant

So should we feel sorry for the old City banks?

I for one won’t be at the funeral. They’re had the money and resources to see the writing on their crumbling walls but refused to read it.

So many people from outside banking’s comfortable closed shop and it has to be said - some within - have pointed to social networking as the way forward, but have been unable to focus the banks on anything above or beyond the City’s walls.

Not the time to look down

Its an interesting metaphor for our banks to see token innovation efforts like Microsoft’s Surface being proudly wheeled out as a piecemeal exercise in a single bank branch as Barclays has done. Do the banks seriously expect their customers to look down at a table top when the future lies in the Cloud?

Just how many people can you really get in a branch after all - and how far is that away from facebook’s 200 million?