Shopping.com Partners Resource Center Developer Blog

Like many Internet users today, you probably share your photos on Flickr; videos on YouTube; movie recommendations on Netflix; personal profiles on Facebook and MySpace; professional profiles on LinkedIn; and likes and dislikes about products and services on various sites including Epinions (a business of Shopping.com). The list goes on.

The social networking phenomenon has inspired the professorial types to write research papers and books. There is this theory about the Wisdom of the Crowds (how people as a group can make a better decision than individuals). Chris Anderson is now famous for his observations about the Long Tail, which among others discusses how much easier it is for people of similar passions to find niche products and services.

The more practical types like the folks at Next Generation Shopping, a Shopping.com API partner, write applications that take advantage of this phenomenon and the opening of the Facebook platform. They recently released a social shopping application on the Facebook platform dubbed My Shopping. The application was introduced via their shopping portal SecretPrices.com with plans of integrating portions of the site’s functionality in the future. The application seems to be getting a good buzz from bloggers around the world, and the adoption rate is growing fast.

MyShopping on Facebook is a new approach on collaborative filtering, which is a fancy term for using the opinions of like-minded buyers to recommend products to purchase. Traditionally, giant retail sites such as Amazon.com are the mediator of such decisions, by mining their massive sales data to come up with recommendations that are based on purchases by similar people, not necessarily known by you. MyShopping on Facebook takes the collaborative recommendation process into the hands of the individuals and their friends.

Here’s what it claims: “The application allows users to shop online with their Facebook friends. Anyone can search for books, music, movies, gadgets, clothing, or anything you have a need for. They can then rate, mark, and share items. For any item, a user can view how many of their friends like or dislike that item, as well as compare the lowest prices available from retail stores.”

Even better, the same friends can also make money in the process, since the items featured are based on merchant listings from online advertising networks such as Shopping.com. Obviously Next Generation Shopping wants to get a share of this advertising revenue. This is the kind of application that Facebook hoped to attract when it opened its platform back in May 2007. Shopping recommendations by friends will attract more members to Facebook’s customer base, and having more members means higher advertising rates.

Let the friendly and profitable shopping begin!