fb gifts holiday

Just in time for the gift-giving season, Facebook is rolling out its Gifts product to all U.S. Facebook users. Gifts was recently in a walled-garden beta; with the new rollout, all us American types will be able to shoot presents back and forth with a few simple mouse clicks.

Gifts is a really fun new feature for the social network. It lets you choose and send a real or digital gift to any f your friends, no address needed and no credit card required for checkout.

On the company blog, we read that Facebook is adding a new gift category, wine, and is also adding a new charitable cause to its lineup: Hurricane Sandy donations via the Robin Hood Foundation.

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Facebook launched Gifts back in September 2012. From the outset, we realized it wasn’t just convenient; it was also darn good medicine for the company’s financials, since Facebook gets to keep a cut of the revenue in most non-charitable cases.

Here’s what Facebook Gifts looks like:

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All the gifts you’ll see are hand-curated, making the app perfect for finding last-minute gifts for hard-to-buy-for friends. Gifts are sorted by category, such as gifts for kids, culinary gifts, household items, and wine. You can als buy virtual/digital goods such as iTunes gift cards.

Other gift options include donations to Blue Star Families, Girls Inc., Donor’s Choose, and now the Robin Hood Foundation’s Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

Facebook Gifts is the reborn version of Karma, a startup that launched back in February 2012 and was quickly acquired by Facebook. As Karma founder and current Facebook Gifts lead Lee Linden told VentureBeat in a recent visit at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, “We think gifting is really a form of communication,” Linden said. “We think people want to give gifts the moment they think of someone … and it may not always be convenient to pull our your purse or wallet and find your credit card right now.”

Image courtesy of jocic, Shutterstock

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