Think carefully: all six have come out in opposition to the bill, which would put tight restrictions on Internet firms in an effort to enforce U.S. copyright laws (although some firms took more convincing stands than others). At least two of the companies, Google and Amazon, have said they may go dark to protest the bill.

If you guessed GoDaddy, which had a public dust up after initially supporting SOPA, you're right. Sort of. GoDaddy's PAC leads in percentage, giving 52.9% of the $38,750 it has given during this election cycle to Representatives that have signed on to co-sponsor SOPA and Senators who are co-sponsoring PIPA.

• Microsoft $88,500 (20.9%)
• eBay $32,750 (35.5%)
• Google $29,000 (47.5%)
• GoDaddy $20,500 (52.9%)
• Yahoo! $11,000 (35.5%)
• Amazon $4,000 (42.1%)

We contacted all six companies asking for comment and requested they get back to us by 3 pm ET/noon PT on Thursday. All of the companies missed that deadline, but we'll update if any of them get back to us.

ReadWriteWeb analyzed Federal Election Commission data maintained by OpenSecret.org. While the reports are for the current election cycle, they do not list the dates of individual donations, making it hard to determine if the donations were made before or after a lawmaker signed on to co-sponsor the bills.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

Outspoken Supporters Received PAC Money

All of the donations were made in the 2012 election cycle, and individual donations ranged from $1,000 to a high of $10,000 given to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. by Microsoft. Only two SOPA/PIPA sponsoring lawmakers received donations from all six company PACs: Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.

Hatch, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee that unanimously approved PIPA in May, has been a long-time backer of the bill and its earlier versions.

"Fake pharmaceuticals threaten people's lives. Stolen movies, music and other products put many out of work," Hatch said in a statement posted on his Web site in May. "This is why protecting property rights is a critical imperative and is why we've come together in introducing this common-sense bill."

Goodlatte, meanwhile, made comments supporting SOPA as early as April, but didn't sign on as a co-sponsor until October.

"It is tempting to think of crimes involving counterfeiting and piracy, or intellectual property (IP) theft, as victimless, but this is simply untrue," he said a day after signing on as co-sponsor. "Piracy denies individuals who have invested in the creation and production of these goods a return on their investment thus reducing the incentive to invest in innovative products and new creative works. The end result is the loss of American jobs."

Among the SOPA/PIPA supporting lawmakers who were the biggest beneficiaries of donations from the PACs of six companies analyzed:

• Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah $15,500
• Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va. $14,000
• Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. $12,000
• Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas $11,000
• Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif. $10,000
• Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif. $7,000
• Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. $7,000
• Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. $7,000
• Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. $7,000
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. $6,500

A complete breakdown of donations by each company's PAC to lawmakers is available.

The OPEN act sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., would allow the International Trade Commission to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties withe foreign websites that are targeted by patent infringement claims.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, on the other hand, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

The OPEN Act does have some flaws, and in some points parralells SOPA, as noted by technology and law blogger Eric Goldman. Goldman notes that, like SOPA, OPEN "assumes there is a problem with foreign rogue websites that needs to be solved...and more importantly, attacking the money supply to supposed bad actors remains too blunt an instrument."

"While OPEN can't really be fixed to resolve my two structural concerns, my hope is that the discussion about OPEN will force rightsowners to provide *credible* evidence of harms that they or consumers are suffering (no more self-serving hype, please), and that such evidence will force us to think carefully about how 'rifle shot' solutions (as opposed to shotgun solutions) can ameliorate those harms," Goldman said.

This "patented prediction technology" will be incorporated into the search function, and its advertising and marketing.

Hunch launched in 2009 as a platform for recommending things that it believed its members would like based on what they shared online. It relaunched in 2010 as an Internet personalization service with a taste-graph driven recommendation engine that recommends highly targeted personal recommendations to its users based on 20 quick questions. Hunch is now officially a part of eBay, but will keep its New York-based office, and continue to operate as its own entity.

PayPal and eBay have come out with new infographics today to show just how well the companies are doing in the mobile realm. It is really kind of ostentatious actually. PayPal specifically realizes that it has lost a lot of the consumer mindshare in mobile payments with everybody talking about how NFC may or may not change how payments fundamentally work. Check out the stats and infographics below.

I cannot quite be sure if PayPal is creating the "couch commerce" prediction out of thin air or if that is something that people have actually been doing. Couch commerce is when a person is sitting at home, usually at night, and shopping via their smartphone or tablet. Laura Chambers, PayPal's head of mobile, said in an interview at CTIA in San Diego in October that the company sees a lot of data on people's spending habits and that there is lot of traction for evening shoppers.

Take a look at the infographics below. Tell us, are you shopping from your couch after Thanksgiving dinner?

Daily deals fatigue is here. Google Offers launched an Android app. LivingSocial has a mobile app, and Groupon's Groupon Now seeks to rope in casual city browsers who are looking for deals on the fly. Amazon's daily deals site, Amazon Local, launched this past August. These sites are trying to take a bite out of the hyperlocal market.

Flash sales sites like Gilt.com, EBay's Daily Deals and Amazon's Woot.com offer deals on specific pieces of merchandise.

DailyDeals.com isn't mobile or even tablet-focused. It is wholly online and social commerce-focused, hoping that consumers will purchase a deal, and share it with their Facebook friends, Twitter followers and other social media buddies.

Wednesday's deal was $20 for $50 worth of custom folded greeting cards at Zazzle.com.

In October, Facebook began integrating with EBay in yet another attempt to bring social commerce to fruition. Facebook's Director of Platform and Mobile Marketing, Katie Mitic, claimed that shopping was "inherently social." Schaffer agrees, "I watch how my wife and friends shop, and it's all about referrals from friends." That may be true offline, sure, but online?

DailyDeals.com seems like another accidental conflation of the social graph ("this is who I know") and the interest graph ("this is what I like"). The social web is still evolving, and for now it's better to pick one or the other. That's exactly what DailyDeals.com is not doing. 

What this Means for Advertisers

Advertisers will have access to Facebook's Open Graph, meaning that advertisements will be far more targeted. If a user says they love basketball, a sporting goods store could target ads to that user. Currently advertisers can only target users based on the Pages they Like - and we all know that the act of clicking "Like" doesn't mean very much at all.

Plus, shopping is inherently social, said Facebook's Director of Platform and Mobile Marketing Katie Mitic:

"Integrating Facebook Open Graph technology across EBay's global commerce platforms represents a powerful way to bring people together across an inherently social activity - shopping."

But just because an activity is inherently social, it doesn't mean that people want to do it together online. Or does it?

Facebook's Previous Social Failures

This is not the first time Facebook has jumped into the commerce space. Just last year, Delta Airlines launched a Facebook "ticket window," which many thought would be the future of e-commerce. Instead, people continued buying tickets from the airline's website, or through deal-finding services like Kayak.com. This proved to be a non-social activity - or, at least, Facebook hasn't found a way to make it social online. When it came to social search, Bing tried highlighting pages that user's Facebook friends "liked." This feature did not take off. Facebook's attempt at challenging Groupon through social deals closed after four months later, and Facebook's Time Warner Facebook app for movie streaming also went down as a failed social activity.

Will EBay's Facebook Presence Change the Social Commerce Game?

Facebook has a history of conflating the social graph with the interest graph, and the new EBay integration might fall prey to that very problem.

The social graph charts "who I know" while the interest graph shows "what I like," and the two don't necessarily mix. For example, what if you're a die-hard Jean-Luc Godard film fan but your closest friends dislike French film? Or what if you have a friend that loves baking bread at home while you prefer dining out at gluten-free restaurants? You won't necessarily start disliking Jean-Luc Godard films and loving bread just because that's how your friends feel.

The social graph and the interest graph may overlap completely in a few key friendships with a best friend, or someone who you jokingly claim you "share the same mindscape" with. These are the relationships that Facebook is really looking for. The question is, will there be enough data available for the behemoth social network to actually find them? Or will it lean heavily on recommendations being shared between friends on social networks?

By buying Zong, eBay is attempting to position PayPal to be a leader in mobile payments for the years to come. Mobile payments are expected to be a $670 billion industry by 2015 according to report from Juniper Research. Zong is a middleman connection between merchants and telephone companies that allows users to make mobile purchases with carrier billing. Can Zong keep PayPal relevant in the mobile payment arms race that includes Google, Square, Verifone and many others?

The idea is to be able to use PayPal with the nine million merchants worldwide that accept the payment from the platform. Users can also buy digital goods with PayPal through Zong. PayPal expects to process $3 billion in mobile payments in 2011. Juniper said that mobile payments will be a $240 billion industry segment this year.

PayPal is definitely feeling the pressure of the competition. When Google Wallet was announced, PayPal executives were one of the first to offer comments to ReadWriteWeb. Here is what Anug Nayar said at the time:

"Put simply - before you try mobile (or any other payments) solution, you need to be great at payments. There is so much more than just technology involved to get payments right ... Any new solution must deliver something better than the existing way to do it. Not just different ... better."

Will Zong make PayPal better? Probably. It will also help it become a more ubiquitous option among all cellphones (smart and feature phones) devices across the world, which could make it a very important acquisition for eBay.

The Web has of course always had an impact on shopping, from the dot.com flame and burns (Boo.com anyone?) to e-commerce success stories like Amazon.com and eBay. So what's new in 2010?

Daily Deals

One of the biggest success stories of 2010 has been daily deals provider Groupon. In October we interviewed Groupon CTO Ken Pelletier to find out why Groupon has been growing so fast. He told us that Groupon's growth has had "a really strong word of mouth element" to it.

Why has social software caught on with shopping? Pelletier explained that "people like to share a deal with friends for a variety of reasons. Maybe to help them save money, or maybe they want to plan to do something together. Or for a lot of social reasons." Groupon receives a "high level of social sharing", he said, and the service gets a lot of activity on Twitter and Facebook.

Groupon isn't the only game in town for daily deals - we mentioned some of its competitors in September.

Real-Time Social Shopping

In June, Amazon bought online auction phenomenon Woot. At the time our own Marshall Kirkpatrick called the deal "a marriage of light- and heavy-weight supply chains," but also noted that Woot is bringing real-time social shopping to Amazon.

Woot's core service is to offer one highly discounted item for sale each day, until either time or inventory runs out. The items are of variable quality, but are often just good enough to buy.

Location Check-ins

Location has been a big trend this year and it affected the shopping sector too (indeed, some would say that the future of location apps is shopping). A good example was American Express and Federated Media announcing in August a free iPhone app, called Social Currency, built on the Foursquare platform. [disclosure: Federated Media sells advertising for ReadWriteWeb]

The app lets users track things they want to buy, upload photos of purchases, and comment on what their friends do - all the while pushing the updates to Twitter and Foursquare.

Facebook Shopping

This year Facebook has made huge bounds forward as a business and it has touched many sectors: including shopping. In June, Amazon added connectivity to Facebook in order to provide product suggestions based on likes and favorites pulled from your social graph.

By connecting your account, you allow Amazon to scrape the interests and favorites of your friends. You can then view suggested gift ideas based on this data. Amazon also will populate lists of items that are popular among all of your friends, as well as suggestions based on your own interests.

Bar Code Scanning

Another trend to ramp up in 2010 was scanning barcodes using your smartphone. While technically this isn't "social shopping," it's an enabler of much better information for consumers - which is inevitably shared to the wider Web.

There are a variety of mobile apps that enable bar code scanning and eBay bought one of them in June: Red Laser. Amazon also got into the barcode scanning game in 2010, with Amazon Mobile. Red Laser was one of the first iPhone applications to become popular with barcode scanning early adopters. The app allows customers to use their phone to scan barcodes of products on store shelves, in order to receive price comparisons from a database of merchants.

Barcode scanning is a rapidly growing market. According to data from industry leader ScanLife, the use of barcode scanners is up 700% in 2010. Other products in this market include Best Buy-funded Tecca and Google's image recognition service Google Goggles.

So overall, 2010 has been a busy year for social technologies in the retail sector. Tell us some of your favorite moments this year in social shopping, or the apps you've come to rely on to help with your shopping.

With thanks to the coverage and analysis of Sarah Perez, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Adrienne Jeffries and Chris Cameron.

The new eBay site integrates technology from eBay's acquisition of Milo.com, a local shopping startup bought by the auction giant for $75 million at the beginning of December. Milo, which calls itself the "anti-Amazon" helps consumers spot local deals in real-time by tracking the product inventory at over 50,000 stores.

Milo's retailer partner list includes several big names like Target, Macy's , Sears, JCPenney, Nordstrom, IKEA, RadioShack, Best Buy, Borders, Barnes & Noble, The Home Depot, EBGames, Gamestop, Finish Line, Toys R Us, Lowe's, Ann Taylor and others. The company touted 140 retail partners at the time of its acquisition.

Now, only weeks later, eBay has launched its first major integration of Milo's technology into an eBay property at giftsnearby.ebay.com. The new site shows popular holiday gift items from local stores either in or near a user's zip code.

Best Buy has stepped up as a launch partner with the site, offering GiftsNearby shoppers the ability to purchase the item online through the website for pick up at a local store. It's the only store at present with this option.

As for the user experience, it's pretty good, for what was clearly quick and dirty pre-holiday launch. However, the site lagged at times for us, and then failed to load our local deals on the last refresh. You mileage may vary - we tested on Google Chrome, and not even on all versions (e.g. stable, beta, developer, Canary, etc.)

Local Shopping Heats Up

This isn't the only integration of Milo's technology - eBay recently added local search results to its RedLaser barcode scanning application (another 2010 acquisition) which works on both iPhone and Android mobile platforms. eBay says that GiftsNearby marks the company's "first" e-commerce integration with Milo, a statement that indicates there's more to come.

In 2011, expect to see the local shopping scene heat up even more. eBay now has Milo, Amazon invested $183 million in LivingSocial, another local deals site with Groupon-like aspirations, and Groupon itself will no doubt continue to grow after passing on Google's buyout offer. Meanwhile, Google is sure to pick up a Groupon clone soon enough (BuyWithMe is said to be on the short list), and by the looks of our email inbox, every startup peddling local deals hopes to be the one Google chooses.

In the meantime, you can enjoy the fruits of this localized e-commerce competition for your own holiday shopping purposes at GiftsNearby.ebay.com.

So we'd like to know which social shopping products you used or liked the best in 2010. There are 12 options below. If one of your favorites is not listed, then select 'Other' and mention it in the comments. You may choose up to 3 options.

Of course, while the current integration may be surface-level only, it can only help to propel the site's ridiculously fast growth. In August, Groupon increased its unique visitors by 23%, putting it fourth on a list of the 250 fastest growing properties on the Web.

Last week, the local deal site partnered with Ning and we can likely expect more partnerships of this kind on the horizon. Who's next? Yahoo? Citysearch? Can Groupon get into the location-based service game with a company like Foursquare or Gowalla?

"Since the release of Appcelerator's all native platform in March, we have seen an exponential increase in the pace of application development," says CEO Jeff Haynie. "Some developers are on their sixth app in just a few months, and several have seen their applications hit the top of the charts."

Companies like eBay, NBC and Budweiser have made both inward-facing enterprise apps, and outward-facing consumer apps using Titanium. Smaller startups, like GetGlue, have also used the platform to expand their offerings to mobile devices across several platforms.

The Next Steps

Appcelerator's Scott Schwarzhoff told ReadWriteWeb that the company plans to begin bundling additional packaged features into its SDK that aren't natively provided on various mobile platforms. Many app developers want features like barcode scanners or augmented reality functionality, but these features aren't natively available across all platforms.

Boulder-based image-recognition company Occipital is working on tools like these in the augmented reality space, and recently sold it's popular barcode scanning iPhone app RedLaser to eBay. Appcelerator says it will be looking to package features like barcodes and AR into its SDK for platform agnostic development.

It will be interesting to see in what ways how the recommendations from the Information Technology Industry Council will differ from the "policy framework" put forth by Verizon and Google last month that reaffirmed basic principles of an indiscriminate wireline Internet but made an exception for wireless.

Weighted toward a neutral Internet

Based on the ITIC's member list, we're expecting its proposal to be more - ahem - in the corporate interest than the one put forth by Google and Verizon, which at least called for enforceable neutrality rules. But there are a few companies in the group that could push the recommendations the other way.

ITIC includes cell phone handset makers Nokia and Research in Motion, which have an interest in a less-regulated wireless Internet, and Cisco Systems, which is likely to vote the same way due to its stake in networks that support wireless connections for objects and devices. Both companies signed a letter last year saying formal net neutrality regulations punish innovators, kill jobs and are generally more trouble than they're worth.

The group also includes Apple, which has an established fondness for restricted channels. Another member is Microsoft, which last year told the FCC that broadband access providers should be able to offer tiered services, as long as the market is competitive. "The adoption of unnecessary or insufficiently tailored regulations, such as a prohibition on all types of discrimination, could have 'the unintended consequence of limiting innovation and investment going forward,'" Microsoft wrote in a filing, citing the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

The group also includes infrastructure owners Qualcomm, Intel and Ericsson.

Skype, eBay may push things the other way

But there are a few more populist companies in the group. eBay has supported legislation in the past that would prohibit network operators from "replacing the robust open Internet with 'Pay to Play' private networks that will force out and discriminate against content and service providers that refuse to pay new tolls."

Another member, Skype, has been called "one of the loudest voices for net neutrality from within the high-tech industry," advocating for rules that ensure users can get access to whatever content and services they want on the Web, unfettered.

Lobbyists for ITIC started developing their own recommendations after talks between the FCC and the industry stalled and Google and Verizon released their proposal.

What do you think? Will ITIC's recommendations end up being better for users than Google/Verizon's recommendations - or worse?

Paul Barrett was the first U.K. seller "to be prosecuted for artificially inflating prices by bidding on his own eBay auctions has been told to pay £5,000 in fines and costs, and ordered to do 250 hours community service," according to an article in The Register.

Ebay spokesperson Vanessa Canzini told the Register that Ebay is "extremely pleased" with Barrett's sentence.

"While this case was not solely about shill bidding, we hope that it highlights how seriously we consider the practice of artificially increasing prices. This practice is not only prohibited on eBay as it damages the integrity and fairness of trading on our site, but it is also illegal. We continue to invest over £6 million every year in industry leading technology to proactively detect shill bidding. We will always work closely with law enforcement agencies to ensure that, on the rare occasion someone attempts to follow in Barrett's footsteps, they will be stopped and will face the consequences."

In this case, it doesn't seem that Ebay needed its multi-million dollar software, as Barrett used the same contact information and IP address to place the shill bids and was discovered not by this type of technology, but instead because the odometer reading on a minibus he sold had been tampered with. The resulting investigation led to the discovery of Barrett's artificial price inflation.

Control of RedLaser SDK/API

Occipital already offered an SDK which allowed third-party apps to embed the technology into their branded experiences, so if a barcode scanner is all they wanted, eBay could have simply licensed the technology. eBay apparently wants to control that network of third-party applications, which includes other major retailers like Target.

With eBay's past history of questionable acquisitions, one would hope the company has larger plans for RedLaser than to simply integrate it into their line of applications. eBay is providing the resources and man power to take RedLaser to the next level that Occipital didn't have.

In a phone interview with Robert Scoble today, eBay's VP of mobile Steve Yankovich said the company plans to expand the application beyond the iPhone in order to attain the largest footprint possible. An Android version is coming "in the short term," he said, and he hopes to provide it to other mobile operating systems as well. He also added that the company would not be commenting about its plans for the future of the SDK and API, but said they would be increasing support for developers.

What This Means for Occipital

The purchase is interesting because instead of just gobbling up the entire Occipital company, eBay chose to just purchase this one app and its related technology. Occipital co-founder Jeff Powers told ReadWriteWeb that the company wanted to remain independent to continue with its other projects, which means it is likely eBay originally wanted to buy the entire company.

"Frankly, we didn't start this company to scan barcodes," said Powers. "Our vision for Occipital, and the groundwork we've laid over the past year expands beyond barcodes. We felt we absolutely needed to remain a freestanding company to pursue this vision."

As for Occipital, the company, which has been heads down on new projects for several months, is continuing full-speed-ahead toward their next front: augmented reality and computer vision. Powers mentioned today on Occipital's blog that their next major release "begins our steps down the path of creating a human-computer interface that blends seamlessly with human vision, which will be Occipital's primary focus for the foreseeable future."

"The next application we're releasing next makes heavy use of new raw-video access on the iPhone, and dramatically improves the way people capture 360 degree panoramas," said Powers. "From there, we'll be continually increasing the ability of our interface to understand the world visually. We don't call our stuff AR because AR has been associated with a watered-down experience that doesn't make use of the most powerful mobile sensor -- the camera. Instead, we prefer to call our work augmented vision. Kind of like what Iron Man had for his helmet."

Today, the company introduced a few new members of the team that will be leading these efforts into augmented vision and computer vision. The team has recently added two computer vision engineers and an augmented vision engineer, including one with a PhD in computer vision. The company is taking these efforts very seriously, and should have some interesting releases in the near future.