Facebook Gifts

In September 2012 Facebook decided the missing piece of your friendships was commerce. Facebook Gifts let you send teddy bears, cupcakes and socks from more than 100 retail partners to people whose birthdays you only knew because Facebook told you. A year later it dumped the physical goods. Digital gift cards were 80 percent of sales anyway. That left a gift card store inside a social network, a thing no one has ever asked for. Facebook shut the whole service down on August 12, 2014. The company that knows everything about you could not work out what you wanted.