Because there aren’t enough of these things already: “Today, we’re announcing the App Center, a new place for people to find social apps. The App Center gives developers an additional way to grow their apps and creates opportunities for more types of apps to be successful.” Like I’m giving Facebook my credit card number. I mean, Apple, Microsoft, and Google: fine. But I draw the line at Facebook. Really. I will. And yes, this is sarcasm.
lol @ social apps… are these apps that socialise?
Another tool of socialist conspiracy.
Yeah, facebook has taken socialism to a whole new level.
Which I find all the more hilarious given the millions of hardcore conservatives here in the U.S. who are addicted to the service. Maybe I should tell some of them exactly how much they seem to be enjoying such a Socialist service and watch their heads explode…
Um, you do realize that the preceding comments are humor based on the accidental similarity between “social network” and “socialism”, that they are not actually related concepts, and that Facebook has as much to do with socialist political philosophy as turnips. Don’t you?
Sorry, I thought it would be obvious that was the direction I was going with it too, with the implied “conservatives are generally stupid enough to believe that” sentiment.
I guess I should have put quotes around “Socialist” after all.
Ha! Thought so. I’m so used to political vitriole on the more mainstream sites, though, that your serios-looking tone gave me pause.
[sigh]
God, I am so bored with Facebook already. All this social networking crap is making me sick and I get terrible headaches reading another pointless stuff related to this particular topic.
I’m sure people will eventually give up on social networking in one way or another. The new toy will start to be boring and people will jump on another flashy thing, but now it’s like a madness.
You don’t use it, but you’re keep stumbling upon it whether you want it or not.
I tend to ignore this, but it’s way too invasive to ignore.
Apologies for going off on a slight tangent here, as this relates more to Google and Apple (in my case) than Facebook….. but whatever happened to the carrier billing system like in the old Symbian days?
I’ve personally never been comfortable giving credit card details to any company (sorry, I’m still a cash sorta guy … even most of my Visa/Mastercards are direct-debit type … don’t like spending money I don’t have) and I’m wondering how youngsters make their purchases via iTunes or the App or Play stores? Pretty sure not every parent out there trusts their child with a supplementary card.
Edited 2012-05-10 13:28 UTC
Here, Apple have been a little smarter than Google and decided to provide a sort of gift card system. You can buy those in lots of places with cash, and they translate to “iTunes credit”.
I personally wish there was a standard way to translate cash to “Internet money” like this.
Neolander,
The obliteration of credit cards has been a theme in many of your posts as of late. Don’t you use paypal though?
I had a client who was adamant on paying me with paypal (which I wasn’t accepting), so I told him I’d adjust my billing rate to compensate for paypay’s cut in order to accept it, he backed down and said he’d prefer to pay by check (paypal’s T&C don’t permit me to pass along their fees, which leaves no alternative but to raise my base price to him or take a loss).
I might like paypal-like services in principal, but I object to their taking a percentage of my income instead of a capped transaction fee that better reflects their role in completing the transaction.
If I get paid for a $5k project, paypal might deduct $150, which is ridiculous compared to a free check, or even a $20 wire transfer. Then, on top of that if I’m expected to use paypal to pay for things myself, the value of my $5K income is now only worth $4.7k in real products/services (before taxes of course).
Until fees become reasonable, I’ll tend to prefer cash equivalents for my own income.
Edited 2012-05-10 14:52 UTC
Actually, I have been ranting about credit cards anytime I’m given the option for a few years now. It just happens that there have been many comment threads involving online banking on OSAlert recently
I use paypal because it works in a lot of places (including in websites using different currencies), is easy to use, conceptually secure, free of charges for users, and because I can send money on it using wire transfers. But if banks made the effort to implement such a service by themselves around here like they do in the Netherlands, I would probably switch to it as long as it’s reasonably competitive.
Here, all that banks provide is the so-called “e-CB” system, which at the same time is highly cumbersome, requires both a credit card and a special online banking account, and does not work with every service. Sure, it’s more secure than Paypal to compensate, but that’s not enough to convince me.
If I was at the place of your customer, I would likely have paid by check too, since you give me the option. But due to excessive fraud, the amount of vendors which accept them is declining around here, even though France is probably the most check-friendly country of the EU. Also, they do not work well when you try to pay people in a different currency.
I’ve also heard that people are fond of wire transfers in Germany, but elsewhere it seems that only large businesses use them. And since cash cannot be used directly online, this ends the list of all the means of payment that are directly accessible to me.
Do you mean something paying them on a per-transaction basis (100 transactions/month for 5$ or stuff like that) ?
As my original post says, I’d love to have a true standard for “online cash” that can be conveniently and fairly traded for cash in easily accessible physical places.
Edited 2012-05-10 16:58 UTC
Neolander,
“Do you mean something paying them on a per-transaction basis (100 transactions/month for 5$ or stuff like that) ?”
1c per transaction, wow sign me up! Honestly I’d be willing to pay alot more than that. I think paypal charges some $0.40 per transaction on top of their %. I just hate paying unbounded percentages when I know it costs them less than $0.40 to process, it’s profit they haven’t really earned IMHO.
Technically, we already have the ACH interbank transfers in the US, which work ok especially with re-occurring billing, and are free or next to it in most cases. ACH transfers make it trivial to transfer money between accounts. However due to bank policy & IRS imposed restrictions, people generally can’t use it to pay each other unless they own a business and have filed employee taxation forms with the IRS. This is probably the most popular form of employee payment in the US, but the legal restrictions make it useless as a practical payment method for non-employees.
http://squareup.com
Here’s a company that’s trying to make credit cards more accessible as a form of inter-personal payments. The fees are considerably better than the major credit card processors. I would be all over them if it weren’t for their shortsightedness to only offer their services as smartphone POS terminals. If I could use their service to accept payments online, I’d be using them already in place of traditional merchant processors. I’m curious whether you approve of the model that they are pushing?
I think that percentages could be justified when currency conversions occur, since it is part of the underlying change tarification model. Otherwise… Yeah, not so much.
Here, we use wire transfers this way. Apart from being slow and a bit expensive for one-time transfers, it works pretty well, and normal people can use them to pay each other just as well as companies. But, perhaps due to how slow they are processed, they have never become a truly universal mean of payment.
Hmm, it took me long enough to figure out what “POS” means in this context
I guess that I would have the same issues with them as with Paypal as a customer : they introduce a trusted middleman in financial transactions, that shouldn’t be needed in the first place. It still looks better than using a credit card directly though.
Edited 2012-05-11 14:51 UTC
(addendum)
I know what you are saying though, about existing CC infrastructure being built around legacy concepts and being cryptographically worthless.
I’d also like for viable direct electronic transactions to become standardized and universally accepted. But CC middle men will do everything in their power to keep that from happening.
It’s fascinating, and not just a little scary, to think about how incredibly insecure and fragile credit card processing actually is. All you need is pretty much the card number. No pass-phrase, no identification, very little actual verification that the person using your card is actually you.
Poland is also largely like that …checks or credit cards hardly took off before most became electronic (and earlier to that mostly a wire transfers system based on exchanging paper documents between banks, I believe).
Too bad it’s all so fragmented throughout the EU, makes that whole “common market” thing a bit a pipe dream.
I believe that’s what the deal of MS with Nokia was supposed to bring, their existing carrier arrangements throughout the world …maybe you should look into Windows Phone ;p