Facebook has publicly announced what many developers already knew to be the case: Credits, the company’s virtual currency for canvas applications, will be the only payment method that Facebook allows canvas applications to use for virtual goods. We explored this topic on Tuesday at our Inside Social Apps conference, on a panel featuring Facebook commerce product marketing head Deb Liu and a number of successful developers.

The Credits topic comes up at 14:15, with Liu going into detail at 18:40.

The promise of the virtual currency continues to be that Facebook can use its size, brand-name and features to make the currency bring in more money for developers than they’ve been making with their own payments implementations, even though Facebook takes a 30% cut of all virtual currency transactions.

The first part of the panel, for those interested, covers trends on user growth and retention on Facebook.

ISA 2011: Monetization & Customer Acquisition on the Facebook Platform in 2011 from Inside Network on Vimeo. To download an mp3 version of this talk, please email us at info (at) insidesocialapps (dot) com.