Facebook shutting down Gifts to focus on Buy button
Culture
Goodbye Facebook gifts.
Hello free money on Amazon.
I'm Bridget Carey and this is your CNet update.
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Say goodbye to Facebook Gifts.
You may have seen prompts to buy a gift when your friend is having a birthday.
You can purchase a gift card that they can redeem digitally.
But the gift shop will officially close on August 12th.
It's not the first time Facebook has tried its hand with shopping.
Back in 2012, you could buy actual, physical gifts like teddy bears and chocolates and have it mailed to your friends.
But that ended about a year ago.
It seems the gift cards are not very popular either.
Facebook is putting more focus on helping advertisers sell things, right from inside a post, using a buy button.
So maybe in the future you could see an ad in your news feed to buy a gift card when your friend is having a birthday.
Speaking of online shopping, Amazon is trying something new with Prime members.
Prime is a subscription service that costs a hundred dollars a year and it comes with several perks, including free two day shipping.
But if you choose not to use two day shipping and instead wait longer for a package to arrive.
Amazon will award you with one dollar free in credit to spend a digital video purchase.
This new option is called No Rush Shipping, which takes five to seven business days.
It seems like this new incentive is to help some of the financial burden of the Prime freebies because last week Amazon reported a second quarter loss of $126 million.
XBox One owners will have a new option for getting the latest games.
Electronic Arts has launched EA Access.
It's a Netflix-like subscription service for some EA games.
It cost $5 a month or $30 a year.
It's being rolled out as a beta test now to some users but it will launch for everyone soon.
The subscription also gets members 10% off purchases of E.A. digital content.
And members get access to free trials of new E.A. games up to five days before the release date.
If this is successful, you could be seeing something similar offered by other publishers.
The industry rather sell you digital subscriptions than have you buy a used disk at GameStop, which makes them no money.
And while you're not playing games, you'll wanna check out the updated LinkedIn mobile app.
Profiles have been redesigned to make it easy to scan information about a person.
Right up top you can see what you have in common with another person, like the people you both know or your interests.
It's also easier now for you to make changes to your own profile on the app.
And you'll know how other users found you under who's viewed your profile, you can see people that have searched for your name.
That's your tech news update, you can find more details on these stories at cnet.com.
From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.
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