FacePal: How Facebook Could Rival PayPal. For a long time, Facebook was a walled garden, not allowing Facebook data to be used or shared on other websites. Last year however, that all changed with the launch of Facebook Connect. Since then, hundreds of websites have adopted the platform to allow users to log in via Facebook and to share information such as their social graph or their location. Facebook continues to advocate and advance the platform, most recently by launching Facebook Connect for the iPhone. Facebook Connect has massive reach, and Facebook has yet to monetize it. But the confirmation that Facebook is looking at creating a virtual currency may open up the possibility of a radically new business model for Connect.
By combining this virtual currency with Facebook Connect, Facebook could be the center of a new Internet marketplace for micro-payments, one no longer reliant on credit card transactions. Understanding a Facebook Virtual Currency Facebook Connect's Role The Paypal Vision Realized. Do Stuff For Money - Because Just Asking Isn't Always Enoug.
Facecard. RWW Live: Online Personal Finance - ReadWriteWeb. You can't turn on the TV, visit Yahoo Finance or pick up the Wall Street Journal without hearing about the economic crisis we're in. It's caused most of us to step back and look at our own financial situation. In the next episode of RWW Live, to be broadcasted live at 3.30pm PST Monday (6.30pm EST), we look at how you can use Web tools to improve your personal finances. We have executives from Mint, Wesabe and Tip'd joining us. You can tune into the show, and interact with us via the chat, by clicking here. Join the regulars from RWW Live, plus: Aaron Patzer, Founder and CEO of Mint, a popular online money management service. RWW Live is hosted as always by Sean Ammirati, with Richard MacManus and Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb on the call.
Before the show starts, we're interested in what questions you have for the panelists. Would You Manage Your Money Through The Newspaper? Wesabe and the UK Telegraph Think You Might Online money management service Wesabe and the UK newspaper giant The Telegraph have entered a partnership to offer co-branded tools on the Telegraph website. It's a daring move, we can't help but admire it.
We can't help but wonder how users will feel about it too, though. Wesabe says the partnership is big validation for its model of openness with data. A big increase in the number of Wesabe users will help make the company's aggregate data analysis and financial tips all the more useful, it says. We like this idea and it's clear that many people want to use online services to monitor and manage their finances. We suspect that there will be richer integration of Wesabe into Telegraph pages in the future.
Still, we wonder how comfortable people will be with this particular choice of partners. Do You Want the Newspaper to Have a Direct Line to Your Finances? What about readers? Banking 2.0: Money Management Moves to The Cloud - ReadWriteWeb. There was a time when managing finances from your computer meant you had to use desktop software. Today, that's no longer the case. There are now a number of applications that let you do your banking in the cloud, a trend we've dubbed "banking 2.0. " These sites aren't just simplified versions of our former desktop apps, either. Instead, they offer a number of features that take advantage of their "always on" status.
Forget downloading updates and typing in your transactions line-by-line, these new banking 2.0 sites can offer you better insight into your financial situation with no additional effort on your part beyond just logging in. We recently reviewed the state of online accounting, an area that also may be of interest to you if you're following the banking 2.0 trend. Mint Mint.com may be the most popular of the online banking apps today...or perhaps it's just the most hyped. Wesabe Wesabe takes what's normally a private activity - financial management - and makes it social. Geezeo Xero. Online Accounting: State of the Market. Accounting software for small business and personal use is increasingly moving from the desktop to online.
However, compared to other office software, this transition to online has been relatively slow. Partly that's due to user reticence: writing a document online and sharing it with others (via Google Docs, Office Live, Zoho, or whatever you use) is one thing. Entering sensitive financial information into your browser is harder to adjust to. There are also technical complications when using online accounting software.
Different countries have different tax laws, dealing with multiple currencies is tricky, your software should be compatible with your accountant's, and so on. So what is the state of online accounting software? The Big Guns: Slow, Except Intuit The existing market leaders in accounting software for SMB and personal use are desktop software vendors such as Intuit (with Quicken and QuickBooks) and MYOB. A quick note about Google and Microsoft. Other similar services.