Users can purchase credits to stores like Target, Sephora, or Olive Garden through Facebook, and a plastic card will be sent to their Facebook friend with the credits built into the card. It’s reusable and can hold multiple credits at once, which friends can send to each other on the site.

The move comes as Facebook has worked to build out its Facebook Gifts product this fall, which allows users to pick out physical gifts on the site like chocolates or wine and have them sent to a friend. Facebook Gifts was rolled out to all users in December and is expanding the number of gifts offered on the site.

However, Facebook did not report revenue from the Gifts program during its earnings call Wednesday and said it’s still working to make the Gifts product more widespread. Recognizing that plastic gift cards are still popular makes sense, especially since it allows brands to sell products through their pages on the site.

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Facebook launched its gifts platform in September as a non-advertising method of growing revenue. Users can see when friends have birthdays or get engaged, and are given suggestions for physical, real-world gifts they can have sent to the friend. The company initially partnered with 100 retail partners including Starbucks, and recently expanded to include a variety of well-known brands including Brookstone, Baby Gap, Dean & Deluca, Fab, L’Occitane and Lindt chocolate. The addition of iTunes content will provide a lower-priced option for gift-giving on the site. And songs, apps, and gift cards are some of the most versatile gifts out there, much more so than many of the existing gift options.

Facebook already allows users to find iOS apps in the Facebook App Center and then purchase them through iTunes store, but turning Facebook gifts into a direct platform for purchasing digital content via iTunes marks another step forward in that integration. Apple has heavily integrated Facebook into iOS 6 after Ping failed to gain any social traction among users, so working with Facebook to gift digital content could be an interesting way to drive sales and recommendations.

With the new iTunes offerings, users will be able to select either a song, movie app or album to purchase for a friend, and a code will be sent to the friend’s email address to redeem. Users who don’t want to pick out and recommend specific content can also purchase gift cards for friends, which are available for $10, $15, $25, or $50. When a user purchases content for a friend, it will show up in the timeline, serving as a recommendation both for the content and Facebook’s gift platform.

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However, those gift cards tend to be for a specific retailer or group of stores. Now a Munich-based startup called BonaYou is taking a less constricted approach, and it’s just closed a first round of financing to help it spread across Europe.

Like the other services, BonaYou also plugs into Facebook so the user can select who will receive the gift, but the gift comes in the form of a real or virtual pre-paid Mastercard, rather than a store card. Real cards, which can be redeemed in physical and online stores across Europe, get mailed out in a customizable box, while virtual cards get emailed in PDF form and can only be redeemed with online stores.

Funding came on Monday in the form of €500,000 ($650,000) from HTGF and an undisclosed amount from the Make a Startup Angel Fund. HTGF (High-Tech Gründerfonds) is a very active venture fund for German companies, backed up by the government as well as big national stalwarts like BASF, Deutsche Telekom and Carl Zeiss.

The cash should help with BonaYou’s expansion plans –- right now, the company is only operational in Germany and Austria.

“We are already starting the translation of the website and want to start in the UK, France, Spain and Italy this year,” co-founder Patrick Löffler told me. He said the company intended to expand across Europe, but has no plans to take it further just yet.

Löffler also indicated that BonaYou would soon be adding a collaborative element to its gift-giving service, allowing people to chip in on gifts. This kind of functionality is already available with some of the other social gifting firms, but then again those services are telling the recipient where they can and can’t spend their money.

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Founded and angel-funded in 2006, the Torrance, Calif.-based PixelFish has 15 employees and is similar to TurnHere, offering to create low-cost video promotions for small and medium-sized businesses that can be distributed to outlets like Yellowbook.

PixelFish VP of Sales and Marketing Stephen Condon told us in a phone interview that assets like Eyespot’s Mixer tool will allow clients to edit video on their own, doing things like swapping out voiceovers. The acquisition also gives PixelFish access to video publishing and transcoding tools, as well as a number of provisional patents for online video technologies.

According to Condon, the skeleton crew still with Eyespot will be brought on to help with the transition. Once that transition is complete, Pixelfish will assess whether to keep those employees on or not.

The news comes just days after Jumpcut, a onetime rival of Eyespot in the online video editing space that was acquired by Yahoo, announced that it would no longer be accepting video uploads. Eyespot, which shut down in October, had raised $3.7 $11 million and counted Demand Media and Lucasfilm as customers.

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Until now, micropayment systems have proven most useful for philanthropy. No more, say the Kirigins. The couple (they are married) believes Tipjoy’s version of micropayments, which involves consumers paying for products in increments as small as 10 cents, but paying — and here is their innovation — voluntarily, is powerful enough to help Tipjoy become the next PayPal.

The Kirigins developed Tipjoy’s model as participants in Y Combinator’s winter 2008 startup class. Below the couple shares some lessons learned through YC’s collective iteration process.

F|R: “Free” is de rigueur in business, and micropayments aren’t worth much, so what is the value of using them?

Abby: We get asked that a lot: “Why would someone pay $1 for a picture when they can get it for free?” But people are happy to give money for content they like, it’s just that in the digital world they want to get it first, then if they like it, they’ll pay. You can think of Tipjoy as a recommendation engine, like Digg, but lots of arbitrary stuff gets [Dugg], because it’s free and easy. We’re using real currency as a passive filter for quality. Even if you pay 50 cents to “tip” a site you like, chances are you’ll have been more selective than if you paid nothing to recommend it.

F|R: Why haven’t micropayment systems worked in the past?

Abby: One reason is that on sites like Amazon or PayPal Donations, no one knew you were doing it. Because the dollar amounts are so small, people make micropayments for symbolic as well as economic reasons. Without visibility for your payment, the act of making it loses some of its value to the giver — there is no social reinforcement. On the other hand, look at Facebook gifts. People pay $1 to give a “gift” to a friend because it’s fun and social, and they get recognition for it on the site.

F|R: By making payment voluntary, don’t you risk never being paid?

Ivan: For content that is free to begin with, unpaid donations aren’t a big problem. So far, our payment rates are around 30 percent, and the TPM (tips per mille), or eCPM, are competitive with advertising, though this varies with the type of content. We know it works. When Radiohead released their album “In Rainbows” using a voluntary payment model they brought in $750,000. We will support other models, which mandate payment and would require a pre-paid account or payment withing 30 days.

F|R: How do you make money?

Ivan: If you’re a blogger and a Tipjoy client, you have a widget on your site that lets consumers “tip” you for your content. Tips go into your Tipjoy account. We hold the money and earn interest on the float until you withdraw it. When you cash out, we take a 3 percent fee. There are many ways to optimize and improve our business model, which is a luxury of handling money.

F|R: Can you share a key lesson from the Y Combinator experience?

Abby: The most important lesson is also YC’s motto: “Make something people want.” Before Tipjoy there was no marketplace where people could voluntarily give money to each other for stuff they like. So we built it.

Ivan: Another great aspect is the weekly dinners at which we could discuss our ideas with Paul and the other founders. The takeaway is that founders should talk up their idea to as many people as possible. It is invaluable to get outside your echo chamber and solicit feedback. One huge mistake founders make is staying too long in stealth mode, which means you won’t get any feedback. Another benefit of launching early is the community of early adopters. Tipjoy didn’t have plugins for all the blogging platforms on launch, but within a week our community had made plugins for MovableType, WordPress and Textpattern.

F|R: You’ve said you will extend Tipjoy’s business model beyond voluntary payments, why?

Ivan: Our goals are pretty big, and while people like to give back, that alone isn’t enough to build a big business. So Tipjoy will ultimately offer many options for how and when users make their micropayments. Now we support tipping. We could also allow up to a week or month for payment in a “pay later” model. Another options is subscriptions: Pay if you want, but the service is only on if you pay. Web services could use that model. But we think the nature of digital content allows for a real innovation voluntary payments. That’s how Tipjoy started and we’re always going to be very excited about voluntary.

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