CoFounder of BillMonk Speaks

I had earlier written a post about FaceBook launching its own version of social money managing portal(site?) which looked like a killer of BillMonk. Social money is an interesting concept and seeing BillMonk being featured by Michael Arrington kept me intrigued about the idea and also about the undeniable ingenuity the people had used to solve the social money problem.

The co-founder of BillMonk left a comment on that post and I strongly think their comment itself deserves a post of its own. The comment is produced under verbatim:

As the co-founder of BillMonk, I can honestly say that I was delighted when Facebook made its APIs available. We in fact recent added Facebook integration: http://billmonk.wordpress.com/2006/09/05/facebook-integration-and-profiles/

I don’t see FaceBank (now MoochSpot) as a BillMonk killer, or even a bad thing. Now that we’re integrated with Facebook, their network is just as much an asset to us as to MoochSpot.

But more generally, it’s inevitable that good ideas attract imitators. For us, having competitors validates the social money space, and educates users to choose tools that help with borrowing with friends. Winning becomes a question of focus and knowing what the user wants.

Thanks for your detailed comment guys, I hope to see more of you and also hopefully will become a dedicated user of the service. Cheers.