Facebook is reportedly experimenting with a new way to determine if your friends need a gift: analyzing their status messages.
Facebook Gifts is built off of a service called Karma, which it acquired last year. Karma had a built-in language processor that would read through your friends' status updates and suggest you send a gift when it detected your friend had something to celebrate or needed a pick-me-up.
Facebook has already integrated the gift button for birthdays, so it makes sense that it would take advantage of some of Karma’s other features and offer gifts for other important moments as well.
According to Inside Facebook, the social network has started rolling out gifts for other occasions based on the text of status messages. Specifically, the site has seen a “Give a Gift” button beside status messages announcing a new job. We did not see the message on our own feeds, so it appears the roll-out is currently fairly limited.
What do you think? Would you want a “Give a Gift” button to appear beside status messages of friends? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.