Picture the scene: you’re in a restaurant with mates having a good meal with a glass of wine. Your friend rallies attention round for a possibly fantastic anecdote. Everyone leans in, ears open, listening in anticipation for a killer tale. Forty five seconds later the anecdote ends and the table erupts with laughter. A great story, delivered impeccably with a fantastic punch-line. Everyone sits back as the chuckles die down. And then you give your acquaintance a pound for his efforts.

Sound odd? Well, if the folks at Facebook have their way, this sort of behaviour could become commonplace on the social networking site in the not too distant future. The Facebook gurus are currently testing a ‘credit’ system whereby users purchase a set number of credits for a small price (100 for $1 at the moment) and then allocate these credits to items in their news feed. So if you particularly enjoy the fact that ‘Matt Bevan wants to go for a beer in the sunshine’ or ‘Ben Butcher is the best toast chucker ever’, you can show them this by giving them credits. The theory behind it is that the credits mean a little more than just the current ‘liking’ it because they cost money - the only way people can obtain credits to share out is by purchasing them or receiving them from other people. However, how many credits the user has will not be on display on the user’s profile page as Facebook are keen to emphasize it is not a competitive venture.

It’s a fascinating idea that’s for sure – will people be willing to pay money to show their friends they care? The scheme is currently being tested in fifteen college networks in the USA and shows that whilst money can’t buy you love, it might be able to help others see you love them. But is the idea purely a way of showing that you are a fan of your friend’s updates, or is there another intention? By being able to track which updates people are willing to pay to show their appreciation for, Facebook will be able to see exactly which updates are really meaningful to people, and adapt Highlights and advertising accordingly.

Hypothetically, the system could be viewed as a way of turning the site into a worldwide focus group for advertising companies. Not only that, but my pessimistic streak won’t let me ignore the idea that it could just be another way of increasing posts. With its new Twitter-esque makeover and the advent of updating status with our phones, are Facebook now trying to make us look at it and post more on it to rival Twitter’s meteoric rise?

This is not the only way in which the idea draws comparisons to Twitter and its ‘What are you doing?’ mantra; the only person who will know that the credits have been given will be the person on the receiving end. As such, in theory they are solely a way of showing that you genuinely enjoy and want to know more about your friends’ updates, much in the same way as the ‘follow’ function of Twitter. As there will be no way of using them to alert other friends to posts you enjoyed, it is an entirely personal exchange between giver and receiver. Alerting your friends to posts people have given credits to is an idea Facebook have announced that they might possibly include in the future, but not initially. This level of secrecy however seems vital to keeping any level of competition out of the credit giving system, so it has been made clear that even if it were to be made public when a post receives credits, how many it receives will remain hidden.

The reason this idea has got me thinking is because it’s one of the few ideas that seems to have no counterpart outside of social networking sites. Sharing photos, chatting, telling our friends what we’re up to – none of these are new ideas, they were all around long before the Flickr, Facebook and Twitter generation. But rewarding people for a particularly interesting post with what is effectively a form of currency is born purely out of social networking on the Internet. Never before would I have tipped my friend before I tipped the waiter, and I can’t see it being something that I will take up doing (although maybe that says more about me than anything else). But if Facebook’s credits are a success, then it will mark yet another way in which Web 2.0 has changed the way we interact with each other socially forever.

There will, of course, be screams that the scheme is a purely financial enterprise – a way of getting us to convert our hard-earned pounds to ‘Facebook dollars’ – and in the current climate this is a more prominent idea than ever. However, Facebook stress that the credits are meant to be treated in a similar fashion to their gifts rather than a form of online currency. Doth the site protest too much? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

P.S. If you have any feelings about this post, please do leave a comment – I’ll get my bank details to you for the tip.