HispanicBusiness

Payvment's merchants typically deal in niche markets that might not support a full brick-and-mortar store. Its sellers range from basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who sells limited edition $500 basketballs "hand signed in gold just for you by the NBA's all-time leading scorer," to ManGlaze, a Chicago operation that sells matte nail polish specially for men.

But by leveraging the social connections among Facebook's vast global population, merchants can use Payvment to find customers who share a specific interest. Payvment already accounts for about 80 percent of the shopping on Facebook.

"You're essentially building a business on a train that's going 150 mph," said Christian Taylor, the co-founder and CEO of Payvment, who with his wife Joelle Musante moved from New Haven, Conn., to Silicon Valley to co-found the e-commerce startup on Facebook in 2009.

Like many others in the Facebook ecosystem, Payvment is growing fast, adding about 1,500 new merchants a week, but has even bigger ambitions.

"We're going to see on the order of an eBay coming out of this company, in terms of scale," said Jim Stoneham, Payvment's chief operating officer.

And, like so many other Facebook partners, Payvment is hiring.

A study done by University of Maryland researchers last fall said the Facebook ecosystem directly supports about 53,000 jobs in the United States-dwarfing the just over 3,500 people who work for Facebook-employment that indirectly supports more than 180,000 jobs. The study was partially funded by Facebook, but its authors say they designed its methodology and controlled its findings.

Facebook "is just the engine of a whole lot of growth in a lot of industries," said Il-Horn Hann, the study's co-author and an associate professor of information systems at the university's Robert H. Smith School of Business. "It's not only app developers. It's advertising; it's consumer brands, and so on and so forth."

The largest concentration of Facebook partners is clearly in the Bay Area, although Hann said it's not possible to quantify the local economic impact of the Facebook ecosystem from his data. While some of Facebook's biggest developers are far from Silicon Valley, roughly one quarter of the biggest Facebook apps, measured by audience, are being built by companies based in Silicon Valley, including San Francisco and the East Bay.

It's unknown how many jobs the Facebook apps ecosystem supports in the Bay Area, but the biggest Facebook partner, Zynga, already has a workforce of more than 2,800 people, not much smaller than Facebook's workforce.

Also unclear is whether the Facebook ecosystem is new economic activity or whether it is simply transferring from older online and offline businesses, Hann said.

While Facebook's coming IPO also boosts the visibility of its ecosystem, the startups say they wrestle with how tightly to bind themselves to the company. While Wildfire also works with Twitter, Google+ and other social networks, BranchOut for now is focusing exclusively on Facebook. Given the startup's recent breakout growth, Marini said he doesn't want to distract his team by working with another social network.

And while startups like Wildfire, BranchOut and Payvment are distinct companies, they are also clearly the children of Facebook, and see a huge advantage in staying close to their parent. CEOs like Taylor, Marini and Ransom regularly visit Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, swapping information with Zuckerberg's lieutenants about what works and what doesn't for their businesses.

"Maybe I'm something of a Silicon Valley snob," Taylor said, "but I don't know how you could do this anywhere else but here."