As much as we criticize Facebook around here, we have to give them some credit: they’re trying to constantly overhaul the service and make it easier to use, and often manage to make things a lot smoother.
One problem that had been bugging users was mobile payments. Granted, if you’re buying virtual goods over Facebook, you probably shouldn’t, but what do we know, we don’t play Farmville. Anyway, if you wanted to buy livestock steroids or toxic pesticides or fake organic fertilizer for your farm on the go, it was a seven-step process.
That’s been streamlined down to two.
“The payments experience is just broken for end users,” Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said at the World Mobile Conference, adding that the social networking giant was working on “partnerships with operators to improve the user and developer experience around operator billing that will eliminate the SMS verification for vast majority of customers.”
So, why should you, the non-Farmville user, care? Because it’s a short step from buying virtual goods to using Facebook Payments to pay for stuff you actually need instead of feeding it into a Skinner box. All Facebook needs to do, really, is get you to cough up a credit card and code for mobile payments.
Of course, whether mobile payments really are the future of buying cereal or just a stupid nerd fad is anybody’s guess, but, hey, anything to make those investors happy, right?
(Image via Facebook)