Offerpal coming to LJ?

[charmian]

Been busy, scarce for awhile for various reasons. Anyway, saw something interesting:

LJ appears to be integrating some aspect of Offerpal. (See here, here, here, for example) There appear to be many ways to use Offerpal, so it isn't really clear what it's going to consist of, but it appears to be a payment option.

Offerpal was previously involved in the Scamville controversy, where Techcrunch reported on fraudulent and misleading offers in Facebook games. This led to the then-CEO of Offerpal being replaced by a new CEO, who promised to end these practices.

However, it seems that they still need to improve on this score. Be very, very careful about entering in your cell phone number on the net w/r/t virtual currency offers.

Comments

[foxfirefey]

You always bring me the tastiest info.

[charmian]

Heh, thanks. After reading more about Offerpal, this kind of confuses me, because Offerpal really seems to be affiliated mostly with games like Farmville, and not with sites like LJ.

[foxfirefey]

At this point I don't know if there's many revenue streams LJ isn't willing to at least try! And I guess this could be another way to pay for a paid account.

[charmian]

Yeah, or virtual gifts/userpics. I wonder what they shall do next. I doubt this addition of a new payment method will be very controversial, at least. Seems they're also putting in a community catalogue thing, a la LJ.ru.

[foxfirefey]

Looks like they've just released their shop redo, complete with tokens! So I bet the Offerpal stuff gets translated into tokens and you can then use those for anything the shop offers. Much much better than the gift certificate system they used with Peanut Labs.

[charmian]

Oh, is it actually live now?

/looks

Hmm, I see they put it on the header menu also for some reason (though it seems kind of incongruous).

[cesy]

Is it just me, or are they just stealing ideas from Dreamwidth now? I might not mind so much if they'd actually used the whole open source thing and given credit and so on.

[foxfirefey]

It's not just you, I've seen that notion put forth by people into Dreamwidth and not into Dreamwidth (aka, they don't like that LJ's doing it because Dreamwidth did).

But I don't think it's a case of "stealing" an idea from Dreamwidth. I can say that the first mentioning of Dreamwidth points as a system came from me, literally, on the mailing lists before the site even started (instigating a HUGE bikeshed), and I got the idea from about a million other sites that do the same. There's so many I can't even really point to one as an inspiration. Having a site currency is just a Thing That Social Media Sites Do, for a variety of reasons.

It's not like LJ used our code. I don't even think they cribbed off of it. So why give us any credit for an idea that a gazillion other sites use? Especially considering it's far more likely that they wanted to make a deal with Offerpal for offers-for-credits and that necessitated they implemented an actual credits system.

And there's so many differences between systems. They require you buy tokens in predefined chunks, we don't. They peg their point value at around 1 to a penny, we do it at 1 to a dime. They prorate the cost of points bought in large chunks, we don't.

[charmian]

Nah, this is a pretty widespread idea, so I think it doesn't really matter that DW has a similar feature.

[matgb]

So, is this going to be "pay LJ, get credit elsewhere", or is it going to be "win credit through external offers, use on LJ", or a mixture of both?

I've got the impression TPTB at LJ have realised they were sat ona goldmine of social gaming ops that could've been a cashcow 5 years ago, but are now coming in behind the curve.

There's potential for legit ways of running monetised games through LJ, but givent he track record of both, I'm exceptionally dubious.

[foxfirefey]

I think "win credit through external offers, use on LJ" is the main thrust of this gambit at the moment. I don't really think they're getting into social gaming, except for this awkward embedding that's not been promoted yet.

[charmian]

I agree with Fey that it's probably the latter: an alternate way to pay LJ. The former costs LJ money.

The LJ.ru sector seemed to have some ideas about that, but I suspect that there won't be much in the English language sector, because it's too small.

[watersword]

I am watersword's complete lack of shock.