gifts

The way you should look at the just-announced demise of the Facebook Gifts feature is that it's a step in the evolution of e-commerce on the site. For Facebook Credits, the virtual currency that powered the marketplace of virtual knickknacks, the training wheels are now off. E-commerce on Facebook has moved beyond the relative safety of the company's internal test bed and can now be fully focused on getting pushed out to the social Web at large.

As Facebook has proven in the past two years, its financial success lies right there: building something relatively simple atop its … Read more

It's the end of the line for those drinks, birthday cakes, and pieces of flair on Facebook.

The social network announced Thursday that its Gift Shop--the feature it launched in 2007 that allows users to send personalized items to friends on the network--will close on August 1 to allow the company to focus on improving other features. Gifts that users receive before that date will continue to appear on their pages, and users will still be able to use third-party applications to send and receive greeting cards and other items.

"Closing the Gift Shop may disappoint many of … Read more

In a move that's sure to impact the e-reader pricing wars, Barnes & Noble has fired the first salvo with a $50 gift card offering when you purchase its $259 Nook eBook Reader.

While this technically doesn't qualify as a price cut, it definitely puts pressure on Amazon to either lower the price of the $259 Kindle or throw in a gift card or freebie of its own, such as a case (neither the Kindle or Nook comes with a protective carrying case). Needless to say, Barnes & Noble is trying to gain an advantage as we head … Read more

You're reading Crave, so there's a pretty good chance you're something of a geek at heart. As such, there's a very good chance your Mother's Day gift this year will be of the tech variety, or at least have some kind of a geek slant. Because as a geek, you know that even non-geeks' lives can be better with tech.

I, for example, plan on getting my mother the boxed set of every episode of "Lost" so far, as well as a Netflix account. My friend Mike is upgrading his mother's computer … Read more

Moms, as we all know, are hardly a monolith. It is thus challenging to assemble a definitive list of Mother's Day gift ideas for moms who've conquered their BlackBerrys, moms who can't send a text, moms who think video games embody the world's ills, and even moms who spend all their free time on World of Warcraft.

In an effort to make your last-minute Mom's Day shopping easier, Crave has come up with a few ideas for mothers of varying stripes. From the digicam-happy mom to Octomom to the uber-green mom, we've got yours … Read more

Until yesterday, the only way to buy an app for someone other than yourself was to give an iTunes gift card and say, "This is so you can buy Words With Friends." Lame, right?

Now, giving the gift of apps is a whole lot easier. In iTunes, just click the pull-down menu next to an app's Buy button, then click Gift This App.

From there you'll fill out a short form, starting with how you want to deliver your gift: e-mail or printed certificate.

The latter, of course, is just like what you get when buying … Read more