Since Facebook went public, the company has been seeking the best ways to monetize particularly for the mobile market.  Facebook is aware that a lot of their users are now choosing to login to the social network via their smartphones or tablets, and they haven’t cracked the mobile ad market yet.  Advertising is currently Facebook’s bread and butter and if they cannot translate that to mobile, they may soon start logging revenue loss bigger than their IPO valuation.

And that’s the main reason for the launch of their new service Gifts.  Gifts is a feature for Facebook’s Android app for now, which allows Facebook users to send actual gifts to other Facebook friends.  The service launched with 100 partners such as  Starbucks, Magnolia Bakery and 1-800-Flowers.

“This is truly the heart and soul of Karma, re-imagined inside of Facebook,” Lee Linden, head of Facebook Gifts, told me in an interview. “And it all works perfectly on the phone.”

Good Karma

Gifts stems from Facebook’s acquisition of Karma, a mobile social gifting app, back in May.  Gifts work like this: the service features products and services from their retail partners, which can be sent to their Facebook contacts.  The receiver will be notified about the gift, and can even change some stuff about the gift before it is delivered.  Say for example, I sent a white bear for my mom but she wanted the brown one, she can edit that information before it is shipped.

When the gift is shipped and received, the sender will be notified by Facebook.  The gift arrives with a personalized card from the sender.  Also, the receiver takes care of the delivery information, not the sender, so it lessens the chance of the gift getting lost, unless the receiver wants to troll the sender and have the gift returned.

Gifts work with Facebook’s payment platform, which saves your credit card info.  Also, the shipping is handled by the stores, while Facebook handles the payments.

Gifts is already available but only to a handful of Facebook mobile users: it’s kind of an exclusive rollout.  What they aim to do is test it on the mobile users, and eventually convert recipients into gift-givers. Gifts is available for some Android users but will soon make its way to iOS devices then eventually to desktop/PC users.