"Closing the Gift Shop may disappoint many of the people who have given millions of gifts, but we made the decision after careful thought about where we need to focus our product development efforts."
"We'll be able to focus more on improving and enhancing products and features that people use every day, such as Photos, News Feed, Inbox, games, comments, the "Like" button and the Wall."
That blog post strikes me as a little fishy. I'm not privy to the internals of FB's engineering structure circa 2007, but I doubt a few engineers working on gifts (which even then likely brought in $millions/year) seriously detracted from development elsewhere.
Given the date, I think it's more likely that gifts were removed to help support the growing FB Platform rather than competing with its apps. (In 2007 people had profiles that looked like this: http://yflcsandi.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/facebook-profil...) Either that, or something along the lines of focusing less on revenue-generating activities.
That said, I believe it's better to nurture traditions early, especially if those traditions involve payment. It's also rare for a company to generate significant amounts of revenue from multiple channels, so I'm not sure it was a wise decision to just kill off the Gift Shop.
Annoyingly, quite a few of the removed features have not since been satisfactorily replicated by apps; or else they were once, but those apps have since been removed. I'm not even sure what the point of Facebook apps is anymore, since the useful ones seem to all be gone. (OK, I guess interfacing with websites is useful. The useful Facebook-internal ones all seem to be gone.)
"Closing the Gift Shop may disappoint many of the people who have given millions of gifts, but we made the decision after careful thought about where we need to focus our product development efforts."
"We'll be able to focus more on improving and enhancing products and features that people use every day, such as Photos, News Feed, Inbox, games, comments, the "Like" button and the Wall."