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This chapter in Web history is marked by a number of big companies doing business at a small scale. Groupon, LivingSocial, and even tech companies with a broader reach like Google and Facebook are relentlessly working on ways to match consumers with the local businesses all around them, even though these companies might be headquartered far away.

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?

In 2010, we've seen the rise of so-called "social shopping" services. They rely heavily on technologies such as social networking, crowdsourcing and smart phone scanners. Here we present five of the main social shopping developments of 2010. This kicks off a series of posts that will be published over November and December, looking back on the biggest web technology trends of the year.

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?

Today eBay has launched its new local shopping site called GiftsNearby, while Google continues to hunt for a local e-commerce service after its $6 billion buyout offer was rejected by coupon site Groupon earlier this month.

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.

Yesterday we published an overview of social shopping in 2010, one of the year's top trends. Social shopping is a form of e-commerce in which you can share and access information about retail products through your friends or other users. Social shopping products often have a crowdsourcing component too, enabling you to get the best price or the most relevant data. Groupon and Woot are good examples, but there are a lot of other social shopping products out there.

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.

Social shopping has been a big trend over the past year and there have been few more successful startups in this domain than Groupon. It's a relatively simple concept: offer daily shopping deals to groups of consumers. The details are a little more complicated, in that a deal only eventuates if a pre-set number of people take it. But that's what makes Groupon attractive to businesses, as usually they can only afford to offer low prices if items are bought in bulk. So the service has been a win-win for consumers and businesses.

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.

Today American Express and Federated Media announced a free iPhone app, Social Currency, built on the Foursquare platform. The app lets users track things they want to buy, upload photos of purchases and comment on what their friends do, pushing the updates to Twitter and Foursquare.

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.

This past weekend marked the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's destructive landfall in New Orleans, Louisiana. While the flooding caused by the hurricane was horrific, the events brought out the best in humanitarians - many of whom leveraged the power of the Web to help raise money and gather supplies for relief efforts. Half a decade later, the Web has become a power platform through which to donate to charitable organizations, and one company - Endorse for a Cause (EFAC) - hopes their platform can take this trend to a whole new social level.

The social shopping network Swipely, in private beta for three months, is opening up to the public today. Users upload credit and debit card information so the site seamlessly records where they're "swiping," then choose which purchases to broadcast to friends, with the option to add an image or comment.

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

The experience of shopping and buying items has always been a social one, but online we largely browse and purchase items by ourselves while parked at of our computer monitors. The online shopping experience may soon get far more social as online retail behemoth Amazon has added connectivity to Facebook in order to provide product suggestions based on likes and favorites pulled from the social graph.

What are you going to buy this holiday season? Gift cards aren't very personal, but friends' recommendations can be.

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.