For those Facebook users who can’t bear to tear themselves away from the social network long enough to take a shower, London-based gift company Spinning Hat found a way to ensure proper hygiene.

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On Thursday, Toys “R”Us announced the availability of its new “Become a Sing-a-ma-jig! doll” app on Facebook which essentially allows you to superimpose a picture of your face on an image of the plush, singing doll, then post it on your wall for the world to see.
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This evening Facebook announced that they will officially kill the company’s gift shop on August 1st of this year. Currently generating tens of millions of dollars for the company a year, one has to wonder why the company would take such dramatic steps. Facebook regularly touts how few developers run each segment of their business, but even if the company was generating tens of millions on a couple of developers, apparently more can be generated with the small gifts team working on other projects. So what does this really mean?
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Last week we discussed an application that lets users host their own white elephant party which works great for those in offices or among family members. If you aren’t in an office or simply want to share gifts with your friends, there’s now a great solution for Facebook users that own an iPhone: Little World Gifts. The application actually requires that you use Facebook in order to use it.
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If you’ve ever worked in an office, there’s a good chance that you’ve participated in a Secret Santa game around the holidays. While there are different types of gifting parties, AlbinoPhant is a creative solution which brings the gifting party online. The format is a “white elephant” party in which participants compete for gifts. It’s a pretty entertaining way to share a gifting experience among friends and family.
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Over the past month Facebook has been testing out an upgraded version of the Facebook gift shop and as of last night the company announced the roll out of the upgraded service to all users. The new gift shop will include music gifts from Lala (as we wrote yesterday) and branded sports gifts. If AdNectar research which suggests branded gifts are 1,000 percent more effective is accurate, the sport gifts could turn into a big business.
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Have you ever wondered where all those digital goods that weren’t of high enough quality to make the final cut go? I think we’ve found it. Arend deGruyter-Helfer developed the following image of a pile of Facebook gifts. Obviously there isn’t a real place you can go to find the Facebook Gifts wasteland, but if there was, I’d imagine that this is how that world would look. It’s a piece of digital art that I think would do extremely well as a poster.
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Facebook has been slowly rolling out tests to select developers that want to integrate with the Facebook gift shop. As of today there are approximately 5 companies that have been participating in tests: American Greetings, RealGifts, JibJab, GreetBeatz, and someecards. The latter three only recently began showing up in the gift shop. However Facebook has been testing out the gift shop as a platform for developers to sell virtual gifts over the past few months.
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Want to send a branded Terminator gift to your friends? Maybe not but what if you knew that the gift would also generate money for your friends, would you do that? I would guess that there’s a much better chance you’d send the gift. In a campaign for the new Terminator movie, Facebook is incentivizing users to send out gifts to their friends by also including 10 gift credits for free. The promotion also includes a custom gifts tab within the Terminator Salvation page.
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There’s a good deal of potential in Facebook gifting applications, both native apps offered by Facebook and third party applications that take advantage of Facebook’s developer platform. But few have figured out the sweet spot for monetizing many gifting applications on Facebook. A new application called Personal Picture Gifts is hoping to find a niche way in which to monetize and create value for gifting applications that’s extended to users.
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