DISQUS

Well, it's clear people are trying to populate this domain. But there seems to be different angles at getting into the market.

Some people just like to window shop, be it online or in real life. I think sites like http://www.thisnext.com, http://www.kaboodle.com tailor to those people pretty well, since they let users aggregrate content to their website for browsing. It's almost like a virtual mall.

But what about people who want to do research or talk in a community? That's where I think http://neighborhoods.ebay.com/ and http://www.buypile.com get a little more interesting. They almost provide a forum on various topics that people are interested in.. it's almost like how you'd get advice in real life about things you want to buy.

Only time will tell which type of online shopping site becomes the most popular, although I feel like we'll have room on the internet for all these sites.

Isn't this almost identical to http://www.buypile.com? I guess the ebay community is the big plus here, it's just too bad it's largely limited to ebay content.

There seems to be several types of social shopping going on these days.

On one hand, you have these product aggregration sites like http://www.kaboodle.com, http://www.thisnext.com, which seem to allow people to pull products from various sites and talk about them.

Then you have community driven sites like http://neighborhoods.ebay.com/, http://www.buypile.com, which let users create communities around topics and chat about them.

And finally, you have your typical online retailer like http://www.amazon.com, http://www.ebay.com, which sells products and lets people interact in some way, oftentimes limited to only content they provide.

I think all these sites have their uses, but tailer to an entirely different audience. I guess only time will tell which will be most useful.