http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a1aSz55BoR0...


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 capitalize on its surging population. Another tool, “Like,” lets users tell their friends about products and
other Web sites they favor. Facebook’s U.S. 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.

Virtual Goods

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 ThinkEquity 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 Web sites, 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.