Facebook, MOL join hands for virtual 'credits'

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA: Social networking major Facebook today signed a deal with a Malaysian company, MOL, allowing a virtual currency for online games and services to be sold at retail shops across Asia for the first time.

With this deal, Facebook users in the Asia-Pacific region would be able to purchase the social networking site's virtual currency via new payment modes such as online banking, cyber cafes and authorized retailers from next month. Currently, users in the Asia-Pacific region can only buy the virtual currency using credit cards or PayPal.

The service is provided through MOL's subsidiary MOL AccessPortal.

Many Facebook users prefer to buy physical cards that they can use online as credit, and MOL's 500,000 outlets at 7-Eleven stores and cyber cafes across the Asia-Pacific region will sell these cards.

“We want to make it very easy for people to make lots of money building on top of Facebook,” Vaughan Smith, Facebook's business and corporate development director, told reporters. “What we want to do is to create a virtual currency which makes it very simple and straightforward for our users to buy services when they are using games and services on Facebook.”

The companies are also planning to launch a Facebook Gift Card in Malaysia and Singapore on a trial basis before a global roll out.