Facebook Inc (FB): Times Savior & Is There a PayPal Clone?

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has made its name as a social connection for individuals with other individuals, but it has gone to another level in recent years with the addition of brand pages that allow consumers to connect with their favorite brands and products. The social network has been gathering a near-infinite supply of data and information to develop a robust advertising platform – one that would be the envy of media outlets like the New York Times. But what would you think if your favorite media were to use the Facebook platform to report its news articles? Would it increase you amount of Facebook engagement? When things got tough on its own website, the New York Times used the social network to keep its readers informed.

Facebook Inc (FB): There at the Right Times

Yes, rather than be a victim to technical glitches that resulted in a website crash, the New York Times did a quick pivot in the middle of the day Wednesday, using the social network’s little-known blogging feature to post stories, according to a story from Mark Walsh of Media Post. As the Times website went down for about two hours during the lunch period (Eastern time), the news staff had about five stories to publish online but could not – so Times social media editor Lexi Mainland came up with the idea of using Facebook’s blogging feature, called Notes, to publish the stories.

The Notes feature, which has been in existence for seven years but has not been used much, turned out to be effective for the Times, as about 1.9 million of the paper’s nearly 3.5 million Facebook followers are outside the United States, and Facebook has been the most effective channel to reach international readers. But even since the website outage, the Times has may still post some stories on the Notes blogging site, and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has been noticing, as the firm’s public-relations firm has been touting the Times’ user of Notes, and it has begun raising the consciousness for the feature, which Facebook has been looking to upgrade since it bought blogging platform Storylane last spring. Could this lead to Facebook providing a competitor to Tumblr?

Can Facebook Be Your (Pay)Pal?

While Mark Zuckerberg might be your friend on Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) – or not – and the social platform has been getting some traction in mobile and allowing users to log into various websites using Facebook credentials. As users could log into Facebook on these various websites, there could be a natural extension for users as Facebook continues to expand its marketplace to buy products and services from sponsored retail partners.

Jason Ankeny of FierceMobileContent wrote a piece about Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) working on a PayPal-style mobile in-app purchasing system. Users who have Facebook credentials, have provided credit-card information to Facebook and are logged  into a purchasing site, Facebook is working on a system where users can pay for products or services with their login credentials. Facebook acknowledged a trial run of this payment system with the online retail site JackThreads, which is a clothing site feared toward young men.

Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research, seemed skeptical about the idea, saying that it seemed liked a “dead-on competitor” of PayPal. “Nobody trusts social networks with their financial information, and they are certainly not going to trust Facebook,” the analyst continued.

With fund managers like Patrick Mccormack, Leon Cooperman and Christopher Lord showing some levels of confidence in Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), do you think this payment system idea will work for Facebook, or could it become a PayPal competitor with its massive user base? As you consider this, take a look at the video below which introduces us to Facebook Notes.

DISCLOSURE: None

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