DISQUS

Wow, maybe you should add "think fast and type faster" because when I started writing my comment above there weren't any yet. After I posted there were 6 ahead of me!

Good post, I agree the most with "give to get" and "Reply as often as you can". If I can carry on a conversation with a commenter I know my job was done. Also, for those sites that require registration to post or comment Facebook Connect is a wonderful option. It reduces the barrier to entry and gets people involved with a single click. Pretty soon I suspect nobody will be willing to register anywhere to post, they'll just want to use their Facebook or Google login.

It's nice to see these types of sites being reviewed. Sometimes tech blogs can get too distracted by corporate funding and drama. This is what makes them interesting though, new companies coming up with new ideas. This particular site is interesting for gift giving but I do agree that the design looks a little outdated. It also seems like it could use some work in terms of interfacing with social networks like Facebook to pre-populate friends. Definitely a notable effort in terms of building a site that fills a need and is directly profitable.

I still can't use the Facebook chat. Since I'm on OS X Camino they've classified my browser as unsupported thus no chat. Only just the other day did the bar at the bottom appear that showed my Applications link. I had been using it on top until it disappeared. I wondered why they'd just remove the Applications link completely.

I was waiting for somebody to do this. Unfortunately fbOpen is in very poor shape for mass adoption. Last time I checked you needed to collect all the dependencies to compile Firefox just in order to mod Apache to parse FBML. Its still not compatible with many operating systems and is a beast to get running. I'm surprised Friendster was able to get it running properly.

Yep, unintended uses. I think that was part of the original "web 2.0" definition. But what's so great about it is that you don't have to own an app or website to make it work for you. You can simply use the current online offering and possibly even create a brand for yourself. The hard part is just coming up with that twist to set yourself apart from all the noise.

Jason, any consultant who has had any success should know that its not them who's going to make it happen. Its really the product that drives the campaign. I'd be more wary of consultants who take on a new client with no concern over the quality of the product. Without a good product social media just won't work for you. I'd keep my eye on the consultants who are picky about their clients.

This is a pretty neat tool. I love the fact that they use OpenSocial. The platform has come a long way since it was announced last year. It's becoming very stable and the developer community is growing quickly. I'm not too sure how this is better than simply going to Twitter or Flickr in a new browser tab though, but it does have its charm.

I certainly agree with your comment about Twitter. I've been to conferences where sessions about leveraging social media to improve conversions ends up being a huge advertisement for Twitter. Sure, it's a very useful tool, but there are many more tools than just Twitter. And in the end it comes down to the value you provide on your own site and the methods you use to engage your community on-site.

This was my 2nd Blogworld and I had a great time. What's next? It looks like lots and lots of comments and twitters. The web is speeding up and we want updates on everything every minute of the day. We're passing blog comments to Twitter and getting them duplicated on Facebook because of FriendFeed. We're building lists and lists of friends and followers on all the social networks and syndicating our every move online and off. If anything Blogworld gave us all a slap in the face about really how fast the internet is evolving.

Android still has a way to go in terms of market share. For now I think I'll build an iPhone app and simply port it over to Android when the time is right. Google shouldn't be underestimated though because when you compare OpenSocial to Facebook's fbOpen, Google is the clear leader. fbOpen still won't install on most operating systems, yet OpenSocial is already ported completely to PHP and Java with many more languages coming.

I'd love to attend for the Development track. We currently run a social network for developers, so this is right up our alley. What particularly intrigues me is the OAuth session. We're currently working on implementing OpenSocial and would love to understand the inner workings of OAuth to better understand the platform and the RESTful API. Currently the PHP version of Shindig (OpenSocial) doesn't support OpenSocial 0.8 because the OAuth component isn't complete. Maybe I can complete this component to further the Shindig project. Not to mention all the other sessions in this track that will help us improve our network in terms of scalability and relevance.

I do like the new feature, but I would love to see a feed of new group posts. I rarely click all my groups to keep up on the new posts.

IMO Zlio and Woot aren't Social Shopping sites. Neither allow users to post products or deals or include any sort of social bookmarking mechanism. I think over the past couple years this has become the overall consensus on the definition of social shopping. These awards are going against this definition.

NOMINATE: Mallicious.com

Mallicious is a Social Shopping Mall that's fully integrated into Facebook. It features coupons, deals and price comparison across many online stores. Users can "Clip" products or deals to vote them up to the front page and share them with their friends. The front page displays the most recently popular deals based on a combination of clips and clicks. Users are encouraged to browse the recent price drops for new deals to vote up to the front page and share with their friends.

Users can watch an aggregated list of deals from their friends via the "Social Deals" section inside the Facebook spp.

Maybe to compare to the paid links. If a non-paid link is getting a lot of clicks maybe it can be brought to the administrator's attention and converted to a paid link.

But without any redirect there is no way to track how many clicks the link got. From a statistical standpoint this solution isn't very ideal.

So maybe the ideal solution is to use a 302 and a nofollow on a paid link and a 301 on a non-paid link?

There is nothing wrong with a 302 redirect if used properly. If it's an affiliate link then it's very necessary for tracking of sid's and clicks. A way to avoid any confusion is to block search engine spiders from the redirect script. You can put it in your robots.txt, .htaccess, nofollow and in your redirect code itself. There are several ways to prevent spiders from following the link. Using a 302 in this case is necessary because a 301 would transfer PageRank and Google doesn't allow PR transfers on paid links.

I'm very disappointed to see ebates in this list. For those who don't know they are nothing but thieves. They encourage users to install their toolbar to overwrites affiliate cookies and steal commissions. Not only that, but they make it very difficult to remove the toolbar. So for example suppose you have the toolbar installed and you visit an established coupon site. You click the link on the coupon site and you proceed to make the purchase. The affiliate running the coupon site should earn the commission, but ebates will automatically overwrite the cookie and steal the commission with the toolbar. Ebates is not any better than the thousands of other parasites on the net.

I found this site searching Google news for "social shopping" and was very unimpressed. Not only is the usage very unclear, but there is no way to shop. I checked a couple product pages and there were no merchant links, only AdSense. I agree the AdSense is overdone and that's just going to hurt them. I doubt this will ever get off the ground.

I love the web browser. The newer version is much improved and it's great for watching online video. I don't see any distortion.

I'm not very impressed. They don't have any product photos, no product filters and there doesn't seem to be a search. There isn't much of a design to speak of and the only thing that shows promise is their worldwide support and spidering. I really think they should have waited longer before trying to garner some press. Maybe they just wanted to show off their funding.

Google sure dropped the ball on this one. Amazing how fast Twitter has grown in just the past couple months.

Yet Photobucket still doesn't let you sort the search results by most recent. When are they going to learn?