Facebook says credits won't pay off soon, adds 'like' feature

Facebook Inc Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said he isn’t counting on making money from the company’s Facebook Credits online currency any time soon, even as he pumps resources into the project.

“We’re investing a lot in Credits, but we don’t expect to make a lot of money off of it for a long time,” he said yesterday in a Bloomberg Television interview during the company’s annual developers conference in San Francisco.

Facebook Credits, which hasn’t been widely rolled out to developers, creates a virtual currency for the company’s site— the world’s most popular social network. The credits can be used to pay for virtual items, such as weapons in video games. Palo Alto, California-based Facebook then gets a cut of those sales.

Zuckerberg used the conference to showcase features that will help Facebook capitalise on its surging population. Another tool, ‘Like,’ lets users tell their friends about products and other Web sites they favour. Facebook’s US users almost doubled to 116.3 million last month, according to Reston, Virginia-based ComScore Inc Worldwide, about 400 million people use the service, Facebook said in February.

Facebook expects to make more than $1 billion in revenue this year as it sells more advertising on the site, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter.

With Credits, Facebook is wading into the deepening virtual-goods market, which will almost double to $1.6 billion this year and could reach $3.6 billion in three years, according to Atul Bagga, a Think Equity LLC analyst in San Francisco. The market has attracted startups such as Kwedit Inc, which have their own payment approaches.

The Like program builds on an existing Facebook feature, which lets people click ‘Like’ when a friend posts a status update, photo or web link. The ‘Like’ option will begin appearing on outside websites, including those for the New York Times, Internet Movie Database and Walt Disney Co’s ABC, Facebook said.

When users click ‘like’ on those pages, their friends on Facebook will get an update. The friends can then comment on the information. For example, a Facebook user could see which friends like the jeans on Levis.com, Austin Haugen, a Facebook product manager, said in a blog posting.

Like relies on an approach called “open graph,” which lets companies more easily tap information from Facebook users on their sites. Microsoft Corp, the world’s biggest software maker, is using the features to tie into a new web-based office program called Docs.com.

Users will be able to collaborate and share information with their Facebook friends on documents, such as Word files.