Social services
Facebook is a long way from the place where you just poked people, shared photos, and announced stream-of-consciousness irrelevancies to your supposed friends. It's also a gaming platform, IM client and e-commerce site, to name but a few, and we can now add video rentals to its rapidly growing portfolio.
Many people have grown understandably tired of how cluttered Facebook has become by all these new features, but the new movie rental Facebook app from US media company Miramax, which has just launched in beta in the US, UK and Turkey, according to Paid Content, is surprisingly easy and gratifying to use.
Just go to the Facebook page, and you can start watching five minute clips immediately, albeit from a selection of only 20 movies right now.
But they're pretty decent ones. In the name of exhaustive research we have been watching the scene in From Dusk Til Dawn, in which Quentin Tarantino cast himself as the bloke who gets to drink booze from Selma Hayek's foot, the incredibly sinister and uncomfortable scene in No Country for Old Men when Javier Bardem contemplates killing some poor shop-keeper just for the hell of it, and the bit where Matt Damon publicly humiliates the trustafarian in Good Will Hunting.
The catch is you have to buy Facebook credits to even activate the rental button, as least we assume that as we don't have any and weren't given the option. Renting a full movie, which you stream within Facebook, costs 30 credits. As you can see from the screenshot below 50 credits cost £3, so you're looking at £1.80.
