Facebook wants you to buy the same stuff as your friends

Facebook’s new Buy with Friends program is going to help you keep up by offering you a chance to purchase everything your friends bought and you might even get a discount.

Deb Liu of Facebook Commerce Product Marketing announced the roll out of the new program at the Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 Conference.

Buy with Friends is an attempt to make social commerce more social and it could be both a boon and a bust, depending on which side of the dollar you’re on.

The whole process is one of suggestive selling. Your roommate buys that tractor in Farmville, so you get a notice offering you the same tractor at 40% off. Facebook has now considerably upped the chances of you buying the virtual object and that’s not virtual money that is falling into their pocket. Full article here

And in other news:

• Yesterday, unofficial news came out that Google had acquired fflick, which is a site that lets you log in with your Twitter account and see what your friends have said about movies. Today came the official announcement, and while it didn’t provide any financial details, word is that the price was about $10 million. With the fflick team, Google says it will build features to connect YouTube uses with videos talked about all over the web, and to “surface the best of those conversations for you to participate in.” This seems to be part of the “social layers” Google has been talking about adding to their services.
• If you’ve always wanted to work at Google, this year might be your chance. The company claimed this year would be their biggest hiring year since before the GFC. Last year the company hired 4,500 new employees, so I guess 5,000+ is a safe bet for this year.
• “Twitter isn’t yet a public company, meaning it doesn’t have to deliver earnings reports the way Google and Yahoo have this quarter.  But an unofficial update on the company’s financial situation is available, as Sharepost has indicated that Twitter’s private valuation has hit $4 billion. That’s quite a milestone.  Consider that AOL’s market cap is only $2.58 billion and IAC’s market cap is $2.86 billion right now, by comparison, while rumors put LinkedIn’s private market valuation at $2.91 billion.” From WebProNews. What I found suprising here is how much LinkedIn is worth. I know it’s a great website but I definitely didn’t expect it had hit those kind of numbers yet.