E-commerce is, like, so 2010. These days, it’s all about “F-commerce” — with major brands hawking everything from ketchup to skinny jeans via the world’s most popular social network.

When Facebook opened up its tabs iFrame for developers and expanded offerings for applications and business pages in February, it unlocked a whole world of opportunities for enterprise. Suddenly, businesses could gussy up their Facebook pages, making them look and feel a lot less like, well, Facebook pages.

Meanwhile, merchants could take advantage of new, seamless click and pay e-commerce options. Hence, F-Commerce was born. In the last few months, various corners of the web have been debating whether Facebook could really overtake the web. Some say yes, while others say no.

While in Austin, Texas, I met Steve Golab, an F-commerce pioneer who this week started hawking coffee mugs, T-shirts and burnt-orange and brown (a very trendy color combo) burlap totes on a newly launched Facebook storefront. Golab, the co-founder and CEO of interactive marketing company FG Squared isn’t banking his business on selling eco-friendly grocery bags, he’s betting that other small- to medium-sized businesses that make up his agency’s clientele are going to move away from the big wide open web and into the giant walled garden of Facebook.

While last year, the bulk of his work was focused on the Jive platform for enterprise clients, now he wants to design for Facebook. “To me it was fairly obvious, it was a no-brainer really,” says Golab.

FG Squared offers custom jobs (the whole package, from project management to design and copywriting will run just under ,000), but the business model is obviously turning to creating plug and play templates for businesses to use themselves — something Golab hopes to offer.

The biggest advantage for smaller businesses— well, other than instant access to the largest social  network and the ability to communicate with your community instantly—it’s free. There is no monthly hosting or domain fees.  And, at least for now, Facebook isn’t taking a cut of sales.

“This is what we are all wondering about now. How long will it last?,” Golab says. “The success of this is really hinging on what Facebook decides to do. If they start charging, that could be it.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user overthinkingme.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• How to Make Facebook Stores Pay Off
• The Case for Increased M&A in 2011: Actions and Outlooks
• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators

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Twitter is arming marketers with more tools to help them target users with a new followers dashboard and the ability to aim messages at specific locations. The changes, while not ground-breaking, show how the company is working to improve its business plan by making it easier for marketers to use the network to reach consumers. This is an essential part of Twitter’s monetization plan, making companies more comfortable in leveraging Twitter to advertise to its user base.

Twitter president of revenue Adam Bain spoke at the Ad Age Digital Conference on Wednesday and introduced a new dashboard for marketers that allows them to get detailed information about who is following their accounts. Now, marketers can see over time how their follower base has grown, what interests they have, the gender break downs, where they’re located, how engaged they are and who they follow. Customers can isolate any one segment and get additional information about that audience.

Bain also said Twitter is allowing marketers to target promoted tweets and accounts by location on a country, state or demographic area level. This is something that Twitter began rolling out in a beta test last month but it’s now available for all marketers. It’s a no-brainer feature but it shows that Twitter is quietly ticking off obvious needs as it improves its pitch to marketers.

Yesterday, I went into some of the ways that Twitter has been evolving to improve its appeal to both user and marketers. One reported improvement, brand pages for companies, was sidestepped by Bain, who said he had nothing to report on that front.

Bain continued to stress that Twitter is a viable way for marketers to reach consumers because it’s organic and relevant to them. He said a year after introducing promoted products, engagement is still the same at 3-5 percent, meaning 3-5 percent of users who receive a promoted message are still retweeting, replying to or favoriting promoted tweets and following promoted accounts. He said the key is that marketers are able to insert themselves into a conversation with users so their interaction is viewed less as marketing and more like actual content.

“It’s an ad product that rewards marketers for being good, not just for being loud,” Bain said. “When advertising works it transcends the idea of advertising. In fact people think of it as content.”

And that is gaining traction with marketers. Bain said the number of corporate customers who pay for promoted products has jumped from six last year at this time to 600 while the size of the Twitter sales staff has grown from 5 to more than 50. Bain said there are now 140 million tweets produced a day and 1 billion a week. It initially took Twitter more than three years to get to its first billion tweets.

Again, Twitter still has a ways to go to sort out its monetization plan but the story seems to be improving in small and necessary ways. We’ll see if the company can keep users happy with the service as it ratchet up its money making engine.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Predicting Twitter’s Best Business Opportunities
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
• Facebook Patent Hints at Social Search Plans

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Gadget seems to have dissappeared off the face of the Earth and nobody seems to know where he has gone to. And now the only key to finding him restsin the hands of one man…err dog.

Gadget seems to have dissappeared off the face of the Earth and nobody seems to know where he has gone to. And now the only key to finding him restsin the hands of one man…err dog.