They're serving a market for ads and coupons that used to be the domain of the local newspaper, but if you listen to their executives talk, news media get only a passing mention. Are these targeted local deals services cutting news organizations out of the market that used to keep them afloat, just like Craigslist did to their classifieds?

News as an industry has always been subsidized by advertising and promotion of local businesses. The news attracts a lot of eyeballs, as the advertising industry likes to call human beings, so it makes a good vehicle for local promotions. Now, though, information hubs that aren't for news, like search pages, mobile apps and email inboxes, use up a lot of eyeball-time.

News used to have the advantage of knowing its audience; people looked to news sources for a particular kind of information, so advertisers could focus their efforts on that audience. But now, Web users give off that kind of data with every click of their mouse, and technology powerhouses can use that data to cater to them, even from a distance. Has this eroded the news industry's advantage as an ad platform?

Offering A Raw Deal

These mobile- and social Web-based deal services have leveraged the scale of the Internet to build something that feels local, even if it isn't, and they've done so with great skill, technology, and people-power. Without a doubt, in a financial sense, targeted deals are good for customers. But lots of local businesses complain that these campaigns offer them a raw deal. They may attract short-term customers, but they might come with a sacrifice in quality, bringing people who are only interested in getting a discount, rather than becoming loyal.

That's not a universal opinion. In response to these criticisms, analysts have come to the defense of daily deals with relatively straightforward suggestions for how to make them work for small businesses, even if it takes some rearranging. But if there's one thread upon which supporters and critics agree, it's that these local discount campaigns are not for everyone. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

We Need Smarter News

If that's the case, news organizations still have a chance. They're enabled by Web technology, too. They can track their audience's interests very specifically, since they can see what stories and topics interest them day in and day out, and they can use social media to generate rich conversations on top of those stories. This can help them build a content strategy that attracts and develops reliable target audiences and connect them to local businesses.

Local news can't be replicated from elsewhere; it has to be created in close contact with its audience and their community. It also has to be very well done in order to keep its audience interested, and that's expensive. But the kind of intimate familiarity local news can forge between neighbors and businesses might prove invaluable if bolstered by good information technology.

But practically everybody's looking to stake a claim in this gold mine. Banks are looking to trade their rich customer data for deals, too. And Facebook might be able to offer local businesses the most direct line to their customers, and they'd have much less overhead doing so than a news site. As we reported earlier this year, 70% of local businesses use Facebook for marketing already. Whether that's truly effective for them or not, it certainly speaks of a low barrier to entry.

If news organizations are going to to keep a piece of this business, they'll need to match high technology with great content, and they'll have to do everything they possibly can to keep the conversation lively, timely, and dependent on their stories.

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.

I caught up with Groupon CTO Ken Pelletier, who has been with the company since it was founded in 2007, to find out how Groupon began and what's made it such a success.

Richard MacManus: Can you tell us how Groupon was conceived. Were you around right at the beginning?

Ken Pelletier: A lot of people think that Groupon began in November of '08. That's when we made a significant change in our direction, but we really started back in early '07. Andrew Mason, our founder, had an idea for a collective action platform [where] the collective solve problems that are not easy to solve as individuals. So we built that platform [called The Point].

It was an open platform where anyone could create a campaign. At a tipping point and if you've got enough people - or money in a case of a fund raiser - to solve your problem, only then would anybody be on the hook to do whatever the action was, or to give the money that they pledged. So that was the basic model.

We had a fairly small crew then. I was one of the first people in, I think second after Andrew [the founder]. We had a team of about four or five. Three of those people are still here.

At the end of '08, in the fall, we'd had this idea knocking around for a while to use the same model [for] collective buying. We thought it would be logistically heavy and sticky for us, selling products, having to have sales people and customer service. But, at that time, we decided to do an experiment - just to see if that idea had any legs. So we did the cheapest thing that we could possibly do to improve how we ran some local deals here in Chicago, with merchants. The first one was right here in our building.

We built up a small mailing list [and] got a recipe that we thought would work best for local stuff. A new deal each day. We launched something pretty quickly, really just a few weeks between the time we decided we'd do that experiment and [when] we built it.

We manned it on top of the same [collective action] platform that we'd already built, The Point. I mean most of what Groupon was built on was The Point and we were just putting a new face on it, a new user experience. And kind of adapting it for Groupon.

How Groupon Has Evolved Since 2008

RM: Since the launch in late 2008 till now, did the product change over that time?

KP: Yes, significantly. Once we realized that it looked promising, we started spending more of our time pursuing that [idea]. Then fairly quickly we pivoted and said: let's go full steam on this. Because we were getting signals that it was really good and was going to work well for us. So we decided that we'd put all our efforts into it.

We invested pretty heavily in tuning the user experience in particular, as a first step. And then we changed the core platform to do more things that were really squarely in the collective buying category, as opposed to an open flexible platform for anything. And we've grown the team and done lots of things.

Next Page: User demographics, usage patterns, and how Groupon leverages Twitter and Facebook.

Richard MacManus: Is there a particular type of person that uses this product a lot, in terms of the demographics, or is it pretty broad?

Ken Pelletier: I think it's pretty broad. It makes it a fun product to work on, where there's a really broad appeal. We have a pretty good handle on our demographics, but there's fairly wide spectrum. We know that skews toward women [and] it's a fairly young audience. But we offer [retail] products and we're in a number of different cities, so that makes the spectrum of demographics pretty wide.

RM: Since the launch, have there been any particular usage patterns that have surprised you as the product has grown? Things that you perhaps weren't expecting when you launched the product...

KP: We've had a really strong word of mouth element to our growth. I guess it's no surprise, but it's one of the things we thought about in the beginning - and to try to tune for. 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. It's an easy thing to do, whereas on The Point when we were doing collective action, it's a little bit of a higher bar.

So it certainly is a high level of social sharing and we see lots and lots of activity on Twitter and Facebook. So in subtle ways we try to optimize for that.

Twitter and Facebook

RM: Facebook and Twitter have become extremely popular in the last year or two, so has that changed the way people use Groupon?

KP: I think so, yeah. I think there's a natural shift towards people using those different types of media to share - which we are certainly happy with. So we make all of that possible right from the site.

We watch those [platforms] and they are really, really active. There's a lot of hype [about] Twitter in particular and Facebook as well. It's a little bit easier to see [results] on Twitter, if you get a live search going and you watch references to Groupon. It's pretty active, so it is certainly a big factor.

Focus on Mobile

RM: In April, you had a big investment into the company and I know that a lot of that will be used for expanding into different markets [i.e. new countries and cities]. But in terms of the product itself, are you planning to expand the product - for example targeting different devices or creating new features?

KP: Yes, absolutely. Of course, part of that is to expand and we're expanding rapidly. We're in 30 countries now, something like 250 cities internationally - including about 100 cities in the US. We're growing rapidly and hiring for expansion. But a big part of that is certainly going to be focused on the product.

There are some big things that we're doing and things that we've announced already, like personalization of deals.

Mobile is a big push for us. We've got a whole team of mobile developers and we are already on Android and iPhone. We've got a mobile website as well. We're seeing a lot of growth in that area [and] we think it's a really natural fit. And there's certainly a trend in the industry toward mobile.

One of the things that I see as a challenge is to keep the simplicity which we think is one of the key parts of the recipe that makes Groupon work. It's a pretty simple interface, it's easy to use. So we're going to defend that and not just add features. We're investing pretty heavily on features that don't change the way the user acts, like a personalization engine. It doesn't compromise that simplicity. [But] there's a lot of complexity and sophistication that goes into that. It gives a better over-all experience. At the end of the day, you're [still] presented with a single deal per day.

Those were the kinds of things that we're working on, plus lots of things that we're not announcing yet.

RM: Thanks Ken! Readers, let us know in the comments if you use Groupon or similar 'deal of the day' products. What's been your experience of it?

The app was launched to complement Currency, a website that features financial advice for young people. The app adds a social and gaming component to the site.

The Currency site features a Social Currency leaderboard for users with the most check-ins. Social Currency users can get "offers badges like "Thrifty Spender" and "Super Shutterbug," which the site says will soon show up on users' Foursquare badges list (UPDATE: The site originally said badges would soon show up in Foursquare; it has been changed to say they will only be viewable in Social Currency. The badges look very similar to Foursquare badges).

This new app represents another A-list brand bagged by Foursquare. American Express and its partners (disclaimer: Federated Media sells ads on ReadWriteWeb) chose the Foursquare platform over Twitter or Facebook, even though both have more users and the latter offers location check-ins.

The companies were clearly interested in Foursquare's game mechanics in addition to its social network. Users "play" Social Currency with their friends and every action results in points and "unlocking" badges.

There are arguably better apps for shopping check-ins, tracking your purchases and making shopping social. But the Social Currency app is well-made, looks just like Foursquare and includes some neat features, like adding a photo of an item you "want" to a "birthday" or "Christmas" list, and being able to comment on your friends' actions. By collaborating with Foursquare, American Express took a boring effort to "extend personal finance education" and made it social and fresh.

What do you think? Would you use this app?

EFAC is essentially an affiliate advertising network that gives a majority (70%) of its profits to charity. With the popularity of social sharing on the Web and the rise of recommendation services, EFAC seems to be a perfect fit for the Web-savvy shopper looking to help raise money for a good cause.

The privately-funded startup is launching with 10 high-profile charities, including the American Red Cross, the Humane Society of the United States and Kiva.org. Other charities will be added to the site over time based on demand from user voting. Users can also earn points, badges and prizes based on their activity - a tenant of today's social Web that has been proven to drive deep engagement.

The company hopes to raise further private equity later this year and intends on using the money to develop mobile applications for both the iPhone and Android devices.

Try to explain this idea to any of your non-techie friends, and you'll probably get one reaction: ew, creepy.

Swipely founder Angus Davis acknowledged the challenge. But he said Swipely had twice as many inquiries as it had beta invites, the thousands of users who did get invites love the service, and besides, the company isn't focused on drafting users right now. It's working on user experience and added value, Davis said, and will attract users over time.

A screenshot from Swipely yesterday.

The ultimate goal is to connect the offline world, where people do most of their spending, with the online world, where they do most of their talking about their spending. People spend most of their money offline but most online marketing pushes users toward an online purchase, Davis said - "Big disconnect."

How it works

Swipely collects purchase information from more than 4,000 banks and credit card companies, using the Localeze database to match transaction codes to physical locations. Users can also forward email receipts to Swipely or install a Gmail plugin that pulls receipt data automatically.

You can broadcast all your purchases, all your purchases from a specific store, or pick individual purchases to show on Swipely, Twitter and Facebook. (Note: Swipely shows the location and name of the place where you shopped but not the dollar amount of the purchase, unlike competitor Blippy.)The site is not indexable by search engines but it will be in the future.

The data is used to target users for ads and discounts. Users can also search for all the comments for a store or item, similar to user reviews on a site like Yelp or Amazon.

"What social commerce is doing is empowering consumers to use that data... to rate, review, discover, save money within the context of a social media experience," Davis said.

Life as a game

The "movie buff" Swipely badge.

Swipe is adding the element of gaming with "badges," similar to Foursquare. Eventually, badges will be used for real discounts to reward loyal shoppers.

Swipely is offering free music, free books, free coffee, free movies and free apps to users who earn the "Turntable", "Bookworm", "Movie Buff" or "App Store-Aholic" badges on Swipely over the next four weeks (full rules available at swipely.com/s/promo.html).

Learning from others' mistakes

Swipely's ideas about social shopping are not pioneering - the space is pretty hot with investors, startups like Blippy and Shopkick as well as the Amazon-Facebook purchase sharing partnership.

But the site's creators have been able to learn from some of the mistakes others have made. Don't broadcast anything without asking users first (thanks, Facebook and Beacon) and don't let your users' credit cards show up in a Google search (thanks, Blippy).

For consumers, security is a major issue. Swipely's connection is SSL-encrypted. Even though it saves your bank login information, neither users nor hackers can move money from Swipely. Additionally, banking information is never displayed on the site after it's initially entered.

Future hurdles

Swipely has plenty of challenges. The backend is complicated, for one - transactions don't show up until a day or two after they've been made, and only about 70% of purchases are being matched to locations.

And "we still have a hurdle to overcome in terms of convincing people to participate," Davis said. But he thinks he knows how to convince people to overshare: Save them money.

"The opportunity is to really reshape loyalty programs as we know it. If we can do that, then it has breakout potential in terms of number of people that can be interested in participating," Davis said.

Suggestions can come from any of your Facebook friends regardless of whether they connect their accounts with Amazon. By connecting your account, you allow Amazon to scrape your friend's interests and favorites. You can then view suggested gift ideas based on this data to help you make a wiser purchase, but in many cases (at least as I try right now) profiles lack enough information to populate suggestions.

Amazon also will populate lists of items that are popular among all of your friends, as well as suggestions based on your own interests. I just so happen to keep an exhaustive list of favorites and interests on my Facebook profile, so the suggestions are pretty helpful for me. Looking through the suggested books and movies turns up some interesting results I might consider when I need something to read or watch.

The added service is currently in beta, but users can go to Amazon's Facebook setup page to connect their accounts and authorize the sharing of friend data. This is a big move for Amazon as they begin to leverage Facebook, which has scored another large victory in spreading its influence across the web. Now just imagine if iTunes had something like this.

Richard MacManus recently covered the trends in e-commerce over the past decade. He noted that Amazon and eBay have dominated the online retail market with their model of using implicit user data to generate recommendations for others. Although this model will surely remain a centerpiece of the online retail experience, it may soon face competition as "social shopping" takes off.

What is social shopping? This is similar to the question of "What is social search," which I addressed previously by describing the three flavors of social search: what they are, why they're relevant and how they will help you search better. The Amazon and eBay model of online retail tapped into what I refer to as "collective social search." Social shopping, on the other hand, is more like "friend-filtered social search."

In social shopping, you see recommendations and reviews that your friends have shared. You see items that your friends have purchased or brands that your friends have shopped with. This matters a lot when you're shopping for a digital camera and are stuck deciding between three different models. Of course, the last 10 years' worth of people's purchasing histories and written reviews on Amazon may help you narrow your choice - if you can filter out the noise. But those reviewers are entirely anonymous to you, even though they may use a real name and have a rating history with the site.

The decision you are making, as with most decisions, will carry consequences going forward, which is a part of the reason why collective intelligence can't provide the necessary emotional "spark" in quite the way that a personal recommendation can. Patricia Mejia, a commenter on Richard's e-commerce trends post, explained why she wants this in shopping: "I want to be inspired, intrigued and entertained when I shop online."

Algorithms don't provide that emotion. But a recommendation from a friend just might.

Plus, users increasingly expect this, and the larger and more connected our networks become, the more powerful this social shopping model will be. What are the social shopping services that do this best today? (Hint: not Amazon.)

Sites like ProductWiki are devoted to product comparisons, but their user base is most likely not your peer network. ThisNext and Kaboodle lie closer to the intersection of social media and e-commerce. They are predominantly social networks dedicated to sharing products and personal reviews.

Kaboodle's user profile for "aplyler" closely resembles other social networking sites, and the site provides functionality for creating product lists, commenting on items and, of course, adding friends.

On ThisNext, users' recommendations are featured front and center on their profiles. Here, "rjax" has been promoted to "Expert Maven" because of her extensive collection of recommended items. Unfortunately, the collection's range is so vast that you probably wouldn't care about the Christmas ornaments if you liked her review of the Macbook art decal.

Thus, the limitation with sites like ThisNext and Kaboodle is that you, your friends and the products you're going to buy all exist on those sites. In other words, the sites are social shopping silos.

RunToShop, on the other hand, brings a distributed social networking model to social shopping. A small Finnish startup, RunToShop aims to bring social recommendations to you wherever you may be, and from the friends in your network who you trust.

This means that if you're shopping for golf clubs on Smart Golf, recommendations will be embedded on the site through the RunToShop widget. Currently, all user reviews are shown, but in the next release, recommendations from friends will be prioritized. (You can pull in your friends with Facebook Connect.)

RunToShop also integrates with Facebook. So, if Facebook is where you spend most of your time, you can browse product offerings and friends' recommendations directly through the RunToShop Facebook app.

Finally, its distributed social networking platform allows your product reviews to percolate out to other sites where those products exist. If your long-lost sister, for example, discovers one of these products through LinkedIn, she can view your recommendation right there.

Based on most of the services I've seen to date, including RunToShop, the implementation and user experience around social shopping still has a long way to go. In the meantime, keep this in mind the next time you're shopping for the right social shopping service: will it provide the emotional spark you need?

Guest author: Brynn Evans is digital anthropologist, design researcher and author who studies social interaction design and social search.

Of course not everyone has an online shopping wish list, which is why in this post we present a list of 10 cool social shopping wish list sites. Why not forward onto your family and friends :-)

1. Amazon Wish Lists

A few people mentioned Amazon Wish Lists, in many ways the benchmark for shopping wishlists. Joshua Porter, Interface designer and strategy consultant for social web apps, tweeted that Amazon Wish Lists let users add stuff and see what others added, however "they don't do much around exposing/aggregating wish lists publicly."

Amazon is pretty good at promoting this feature - currently they have a page describing how users can get their Wish List holiday-ready. They also recently released something called Universal Wish List, which allows users to add products from any website to their Amazon Wish List with one click.

2. Giftag

In September we blogged about Giftag, a social shopping service that uses open standards. Created by leading retailer Best Buy, Giftag is a browser plugin that lets you make online wishlists and share them with your friends. The technology will be integrated into Best Buy's web site in the coming months. Specifically, Giftag uses the microformat hProduct - an emerging data standard that is embedded in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. It's similar to the microformats hListing and hReview. There's also a Facebook app. A word of warning though: one of our commenters noted some privacy issues with Giftag.

3. Wists

Phil Bradley suggested Wists, a site that has been around for some time now. It aims to "make publishing or sharing lists of recommendations and wishlists easier and more appealing than maintaining a weblog and not tied to one particular store." Wists was founded by David Galbraith, a long-standing member of the blogging and RSS community.

4. Boxedup

Chris Osborne suggested the startup he co-founded, boxedup (also noted by @itamarw). It's a well-designed social wishlist site, where you can import your Amazon Wish List and then use a browser plug-in to add new items. There's also a Facebook app.

I found it easy to add things into my Boxedup list; I was impressed enough that I will probably continue to use this one.

5. ThisNext

Cwellhouser suggested ThisNext, a social shopping site where "where "trendsters" recommend cool products online". It's a colorful site and obviously aimed at the young and hip demographic. It's described as "a shopcasting network where you can discover great products based on our members' recommendations." It looks like a great site to find a cool present for your younger sister or brother perhaps - a Juicy Couture Charm Bracelet is currently the rave.

6. Wishpot

Wishpot (suggested by Colm Brophy) aims to "makes it easy for you to shop anywhere, keep all your finds in one place, connect with friends, and discover the hottest deals." Wishpot has teamed up with Shopping.com to offer price comparison across a range of retailers. It also has price alerts, a now common way for shopping websites to alert their users when an item goes on sale or reaches a target price.

7. Kaboodle

Sherry Main suggested Kaboodle. As we reported back in August 2007, Kaboodle was acquired for $30M+ by Hearst. We'd reviewed the site before, noting that it had a clean UI and a comprehensive feature set. Users can collect shopping items from many sites using the Kaboodle toolbar. The items can then be organized into collections, reviewed and shared with other users.

8. Wishli.st

wishli.st is a British site "where users can make a list of the presents they would like and share it with friends and family who can then buy items from the list or contribute money towards particular items." An example wishlist is that of founder David Haywood Smith.

9. FriendShopper

FriendShopper claims to be "the first real time social shopping application online, where users can shop any store across the web and communicate about those products effectively and easily." It was recently featured on AltSearchEngines, where it was explained that users need to install a "bookmarklet" - a button that sits in their browser. From there users can bookmark items and share them with their friends. Items can be added into a chat window too.

10. Froogle

Ashutosh Nilkanth pointed out Google's Froogle, which has a Shopping List page. It's a typically minimalist design, but has the advantage of a large number of reviews on popular products, ratings by presumably an even larger number of people, excellent price comparison features, and the general data thoroughness we've come to expect of Google.

Add Yours Here

These are 10 of our favorite social shopping wish lists, but we're sure to have missed some of your favorites. Please add to the list in the comments.

This type of interaction could be useful for those who want to shop together, but it seems like it may be even more useful to promote interaction between site owners and visitors. In this way, the service is not only beneficial to general consumers who want to shop with their friends, but it could also be utilized in a business environment.

It's easy to imagine site owners using the tool to provide instructional tours or training to their new customers on how to use their web site. For example, an office supply company could demonstrate how to use search, shopping lists, and checkout to all the office managers in a particular company at the same time. The visitors could respond with feedback and questions as the instruction was provided, leading to a better comprehension of what a particular company's web site had to offer.

The tool is a solely commercial product that is marketed to e-commerce site owners at a base price of $199 per month. This allows for an unlimited number of users and up to 500 sessions per month. A 15-day free trial version is available here or you can get a taste of what Clavardon is like by trying the online demo.

Since the tool is so good for providing live support, the "shop with friends" aspect seems to be more of a secondary feature. Although possible, there are plenty of other social shopping services that provide more features in that area.

However, live support and chat features are incredibly useful in today's fast-paced world where we don't have time to wait for an email back from support. A tool like Clavardon improves upon the live support offerings that are already available to allow for a more personalized and social experience. That alone makes the product notable and worth a look.