Facebook’s embedded option

Going into China is not likely to help Facebook make more money. Facebook offering a payment service (which, I agree with another top-level comment, seems like the "obvious" thing for Facebook to do) I would never trust, because Facebook breaks too many of its features too regularly. If the attitude of the engineering team is "don't be afraid to break things," I'm not going to put my financial data through their servers. Not no way, not no how.

Out of the options I think search is the most likely, followed by entry into China and then payments way down the stack.

Search is obviously a big, big money spinner and Facebook now has enough people on who keep it open during the day that they could get a large amount of traffic from people who aren't as interested in the different ways search results can be generated and aren't that fussed. With their database of places, events, venues and so on they'd probably have very interesting results for a specific set of information, and I imagine being able to get into that result set would be worth a decent amount of some groups. It's straightforward business but with some serious amount of backend work going, I imagine if we start seeing Facebook staff up rapidly it might signal they're going for it.

I said payments down the stack, I'll quickly justify. Facebook's biggest problem right now is getting people to trust them as a mechanism, they've had a few scandals that have trickled into the mainstream media from privacy options, companies forcing handover of login details and so on, which erodes the trust-base of users slightly which isn't a great start for a payment service.

I wonder how easy (or mostly not-easy) it would be for Facebook to build a search engine: While Facebook have some smart people (and part of the data already), I think Google has more people working on search, than facebook has altogether. And while Google makes it look easy, building a good search engine is not an easy thing. Look at how much Bing spends.

Entering China? I thought the censorship and other legal ramifications of doing that would cripple a western based social network.

Whenever I think of Facebook's monetization strategies all I can think of is payment service, payment service, payment service, payment service.

Having payment details and a verified identity would massively increase the value of Facebook's user profiles and the low-friction payment they could offer would be an invaluable asset.

I think the intersting play is to seach data on FB, which is a different kind of search than Google. ie, ask FB for XYZ slices of data it already has. more like a database query than a www-crawl. the upside for FB here is that just by asking, you've created a situtaion where intent can be inferred. thus, serving them up some targeted ads makes sense. This is a big step for them in solving a problem--not ruining the "social" bit of FB browsing--and that is really the key point. You're just creating a new class of behaviour, that complements an existing one.