Ah yes, Facebook credits. In the old days it was quite possible to purchase Facebook credits online and gift them to someone else, either publicly or privately. In fact, I wrote a tutorial article about how Facebook gift credits work, if you want to see how it "used to be", in some sort of odd digital nostalgia!
Nowadays, however, the new improved Facebook makes gift cards available through Target, Safeway and other online ecommerce sites, but oddly doesn't allow you to buy Facebook credits as a gift on the site itself.
Don't panic, however, because there is a rather clumsy way that you can gift credits within specific games or applications on Facebook, even if you can't send the credits themselves.
Let's start by looking at how to buy credits, then we'll go from there...
There are a couple of ways to get to the Facebook Credit area, but the fastest is to just go to the link from the "Accounts" menu. You end up here:
To purchase credit (or to redeem a Facebook gift card you've received) click on "buy more" and you'll see, there are quite a range of options for how to pay:
Want to redeem a gift card that you've purchased or received? Click on "Show more payment options" and it shows up. But that's not what we're doing, so let's stay focused! Instead, I'll pay via Paypal so click on "Continue" and...
Sure, $1.50 for a small amount of Facebook credits is a good starting point and will make a viable demo! Another click on "Continue" and...
That's it. Facebook credits purchased and saved.
Now, what can I do with them? Here's the official answer from Facebook:
Here's the list of games that support Facebook credits. There's also the general Facebook Credits information area on Facebook itself (facebook.com/credits) for you to check out, notably including the Facebook Gift Card Sales Locator to make that easy.
One last note: it does appear that you can buy Facebook Credits as a gift card through Target.com or BestBuy.com in preset values, then have them mailed to your friend.
So that's the state of things at this point. Might Facebook change things in a month? Quite possibly. Stay tuned!
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Perhaps you could put a date in this article, so we know how current is this information? (Perhaps somewhere around the paragraph starting with "Nowadays, ..." would be appropriate.)
In case the article never gets a date put to it, for future readers, this comment posted on 7/19/2011. So if you're reading this in 2015, this is probably old news :P