Facebook cancels Gifts event due to Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy is making a big impact on technology events, what with the cancellation of the Google Android event scheduled for today. Now, according to PCMag, Facebook has cancelled two of its events scheduled to be held in New York City next week – an engineering open house, and an event where the social networking giant was going to promote its recently launched Gifts service. There is no word yet about the revised dates of the events.

Facebook had launched the Gifts service in September this year. This new service means that now users can send real-life gifts to their friends – be it good old chocolates, socks, coffee or other goodies. If it’s your friend’s birthday tomorrow, you can spot the ‘give her a gift’ link, along with a gift icon and a photo. Once you click on the icon, you will be able to spot the gifts that you could present to your friends for their special day - be it a Starbucks gift card, cupcakes, or a ‘you can never go wrong with’ teddy bear.

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Facebook cancels events due to Hurricane Sandy

The recipient of the gift will then receive a notification on Facebook, asking her to enter the shipping address for the chosen gift. In a few instances, the recipients of the gifts will be able to pick and choose the flavour and size of the cupcakes or a different style of socks. Users, if they wish to, can also exchange the original gifts with something else of their choice.

Clearly, Facebook is trying its hands at an entirely new domain, and this comes after its Karma buyout. Karma aimed to make gift-giving a little more convenient. The service had a ‘storefront’ on their app through which users could select the gift that they would like to give to a friend. They tied up with vendors such as Spotify, Gund, and MOMA for its selection of gifts, adding variety to its offering.

At the time of its acquisition, a post on Karma’s blog read, “We’re thrilled to announce that Karma has been acquired by Facebook. The service that Karma provides will continue to operate in full force. By combining the incredible passion of our community with Facebook’s platform we can delight users in new and meaningful ways.”

Facebook Gifts is currently available to a subset of the service’s US-based customers only, and will be gradually rolled out to others as the idea of real-life gifting on Facebook takes off. In addition to being able to click on the ‘Gifts’ icon on the pages of their Facebook’s friends, users will also be able to do so on their Android phones. That being said, iPhone, and iPad versions are to follow.