Not e-commerce, but f-commerce: Facebook as a platform (for tickets to see rockstars on stage)

Startup Fansnap is trying to bring the events business to Facebook, betting a social layer will help teams and rockstars fill seats.

Image via CrunchBase

FORTUNE -- I heard a new expression today: F-commerce. The "F" is for Facebook, and it refers to transactions that happen in that alternative universe that isn't merely the web, isn't specifically mobile and most definitely is not a physical store. Rather, it's commerce on that friendly service that is crowding out every other so-called platform for digital communications.

The earliest manifestation of F-commerce was Zynga, the "social" gaming company. Zynga is social in that its relatively primitive games are free and happen mostly on Facebook. The money comes from the bizarrely counterintuitive yet incredibly lucrative transactions involving virtual currency: the purchase of goods and services that only work in the game. When Zynga files its widely anticipated IPO documents, the world will see just how much money can be made on the F-platform. More

Posted in: Facebook, Fansnap, Kayak, Mike Janes, Online Communities, Skype, StubHub, Zynga

• PayPal's cashless utopia: Built on eBay's back

  PayPal is working hard to become the gold standard for online payments, chasing down Google and fending off the competition. Meantime, being the apple of eBay's eye, and its subsidiary, hasn't hurt either.

  By Dan Mitchell, contributor

  This week, PayPal is hosting an event in New York called "Cashless Utopia." PayPal's aim is to usher us in to this utopia by establishing itself as the standard mechanism by which we pay for MORE

  Nov 9, 2010 2:54 PM ET
  Posted in: Bling Nation, eBay, Google, Google Checkout, Mastercard, PayPal, StubHub, Todd Rundgren

• eBay: Not yet out of the woods

  It could have been so much worse for eBay (EBAY). Two weeks after the giant online auction site acknowledged that it had paid far too much for Skype, the Internet phone service, and would be writing off $1.4 billion in charges, the company surprised Wall Street with relatively strong results in the rest of its operations.

  After the market closed on Wednesday, eBay reported record revenue of $1.89 billion in the MORE

  yiwyn - Oct 18, 2007 10:29 AM ET
  Posted in: eBay, PayPal, Skype, StubHub