Yes, seriously.

I can't make soup of it. What's their intention long term, everything seems to be in anticipation of what they're really going to do.

In all the time that I used facebook (haven't used it in months) I had a very hard time figuring out how they were making money on or off me.

It can't be the ads I never clicked and it wasn't the subscription fee I never paid.

I believe Facebook has at least 6 business models in operation today, including:

* ads in margin

* special paid for groups

* sponsored likes

(these are discussed in Kirkpatricks book of Facebook - and here: http://www.quora.com/Facebook-1/What-is-the-revenue-distribu...)

Additionally, Facebook has just launched Facebook Credits. Zynga (revenues $600M+) is their launch partner. Facebook gets 30% of their spend.

I do not think they are struggling to monetize.

I always figured they'd go and do a payment system because in facebook the 'graph' of your friends validates you to the point that doing business with someone becomes a lot less risky than on paypal, but for some reason they seem to be holding back on that.

Maybe the zynga deal is a prelude to that.

It would make good sense to do that, facebook is the closest we've got to a verified ID on the net. The issues to contend with would then of course be hacked accounts and such but that's not different from other payment systems.