Recently, Facebook hired former Google’s Director of Product Management, Prashant Fuloria, as the new Director of Product Management for Facebook Payments. Fuloria’s main contribution for Google was his work on Google Checkout. This has ignited the discussion about how Facebook may be preparing to take on a payments system. If you are an active user of Facebook, then you already know that they offer virtual currency within its social network. This new hire marks a move towards taking a payments platform that can reach outside of the Facebook network and onto the web.

Facebook currently accepts credit card payments, but wants to expand its monetary utilities in the future. This puts Facebook directly in competition with PayPal and Google Checkout, who also have a substantial direct-to-consumer revenue stream in a market that has high operational costs and international complexity. The complexity it will already face with this new revenue stream will likely affect the already-challenging and ever-changing landscape of  search engine optimization . Google, who continues to reign, will not take kindly to Facebook’s move, and may make their relationship more complicated than it already is.