Social Network Payments – A gaping hole for killer apps?

By Ed | January 30th, 2009 | Category: Pay Online | No Comments »

There’s been a lot of internet chatter lately that the major thing missing from the internet is a way to process micropayments on social networking sites. A lot of this chatter is coming out of the mobile/SMS micropayments arena with a lot of mud slinging concerning exceptionally usuristic charges from the mobile networks suppliers.

TechCrunch has had several articles recently where reader comment discussions have drawn flaming and argumentative posting from employees at rival organisations and from independent code developers. One such sprang from their recent article comparing the UK’s Mobillcash with Swis/US service Zong. Another article they featured looked at the payment applications under development by facebook, MySpace and Apple, which drew in names such as SpareChange (a PayPal service) and SocialGold. The reader comment discussions on both article provide plenty of food for thought about where online payments will be going in the next couple of years.

If you’ve ever complained about the fee levels charged by PayPal (rather than what parts of a transaction they are applied to), spare a thought for those application developers who are using current mobile phone micropayments technology – they’re parting with up to 50% of their take just to be able to receive the payments, according to the first TechCrunch article above.