Internet » The Rise of We-Commerce

Can't decide what to buy? Ask a friend, or your mom. Shopping's always been a social activity, and social shopping sites are now harnessing the power and promise of networks. They are evolving along with consumer expectations and desires, shaping a new world for e-commerce.

It just makes sense that consumers tend to trust the opinions and recommendations of friends before they trust those of advertisers, promoters and retailers. Social shopping sites, which combine features of social networking 6 Ways to Use Social Media for Business. Free Guide. with online sales, seek to capitalize on the sharing and trust that exist between friends.

"Sharing is one of the inherent human behaviors," explained social shopping site ShopSocially's founder and CEO Jai Rawat. "People share all the time. It's a natural thing for them to do. People love telling other what they bought."

Consumer-to-Consumer Channel

Traditionally, the model of selling goods has relied on a one-way communication channel between retailer and customer, via advertising, targeted emails, or even texts, but new social shopping behaviors are throwing that model into question.

"ShopSocially is creating a consumer-to-consumer marketing channel for online retailers," Rawat told the E-Commerce Times.

ShopSocially calls itself a "shopping recommendation engine," meaning that it gives consumers a way to recommend purchases to their friends via social networking sites. Retailers can purchase a subscription to ShopSocially's service, which, among other things, embeds a social widget on their checkout pages so customers can share their purchases on Facebook, Twitter and via email. Consumers can also post purchase information and recommendations through ShopSocially's site.

Networked Fashion

Social shopping lends itself particularly well to the fashion world, which has spawned several sites and services. One of the largest, Kaboodle, lets users create profiles, save wishlists, and communicate with other shoppers.

"Like Facebook, it allows you to build profiles and connect with other people," Kaboodle's CMO Steve Chien told the E-Commerce Times. "But people are coming to Kaboodle to talk specifically about fashion."

Comparing dresses, purses and shoes -- the kind of social banter that typically takes place in the shopping mall -- happens virtually on Kaboodle, which has about 1.5 million users.

"The power of Kaboodle is tapping into the word-of-mouth marketing that's happening in real life," explained Chien. "There is an element of social discovery that we are replicating online."

It's also just a good way of keeping track of multiple items from various online retailers, and creating a wish list for holidays, birthdays, weddings and other events.

"It's useful to organize your shopping," said Chien. "You can build a wishlist that crosses multiple retailers."

WingTipIt.com is another social shopping site that allows consumers to save items, create lists, and interact with friends, and it also sends out daily emails with information about products consumers have saved, including tips about sales.

"We looked at how consumers were shopping in bricks-and-mortar stores and gave them the gratification they were getting there online," explained WingTipIt's cofounder Carla Holtze. "We built our product on consumer and retailer insights."

Most social shopping sites have business models that rely in part on commissions from sales referred from these sites to retailers, and in part on other continuously evolving strategies such as advertising, direct marketing, cross promotions and data analytics.

Members-Only Model

Another model, used by Gilt Groupe, gives a sense of exclusivity to the experience of social shopping. This site offers invitation-only access to sales and special promotions to its members, who can register for the site for free.

"Gilt Groupe provides access, by invitation only, to its members to the most inspiring merchandise, culinary offerings, and luxury experiences every day, many at up to 60 percent off," explained Jyothi Rao, general manager of women's at Gilt Groupe.

"Gilt works directly with the brands as often as we can, including fashion for women, men, and children; home decor; artisanal ingredients; hotels and travel experiences on every continent; and unique activities to make sure that we offer our members the best deals," Rao told the E-Commerce Times.

As a curated flash sales site, Gilt Groupe gives its members opportunities not available to non-members, while at the same time offering a sense of community.

"I think they enjoy it because it gives them a nice break in the middle of the day. It's something to look forward to," said Rao. "The mystery of what is going to be in the sales each day gives a nice sense of discovery and anticipation. Also, there's a gaming quality to shopping on Gilt.com -- the items are available for only for 36 hours and in limited quantity."

New Models for E-Commerce

All social shopping sites are evolving along with consumer expectations and desires, and they are shaping a new world for e-commerce.

As Deena Varshavskaya, the founder of social shopping site Wanelo, explained to the E-Commerce Times, her site came about because she was trying to conceive of a new model for advertising, marketing and selling.

"The idea for it came out of a conversation with a friend about the future of advertising," said Varshavskaya. "My main thought was that with users getting more and more control of what and how they consume, there's no way that advertising will be the future, at least in its current form. So how will people find out about new relevant things? Through each other, of course."

Internet » The Social Game Changers

For far too long, the Web has struggled to make sense of users by applying metrics that were mere proxies of player behavior. As the social Web expands, a paradigm shift based on previous user behavior metrics will follow. The analytics company that best packages, distills, and helps its clients understand how to better monetize users within the paradigm will gain the biggest share of this new market.

Once considered the red-headed stepchild of the gaming industry, social gaming is finally taking its rightful place at the table. Over the past several years, the free-to-play (F2P) model has surged to the forefront of next-generation gaming, while console game companies and traditional game developers have faltered by the wayside.

With its risk-free adoption, discoverability, and virtual goods format, the F2P model demonstrates how billions of smaller transactions, coupled with lower go-to-market costs and data-driven design, offer compelling game experiences to a market segment the traditional gaming companies persistently ignored.

Facebook is the dominant platform of choice for large social game developers like Zynga, Playdom, Playfish, Crowdstar, PopCap, and Kabam, among others. The ability to tap into a social graph of more than 750 million users to leverage network effects and shared interests has allowed the F2P business model to explode onto the gaming scene within a veritable blink of an eye.

User analytics have also changed, evolving from measuring and optimizing applications that sent hugs and vampire bites to games that had more complex game mechanics like Zynga's "FarmVille," the current linchpin of big data's social gaming success. Today's emerging social Web has the potential to leapfrog even Zynga's accomplishments as it expands beyond the traditional social networking 6 Ways to Use Social Media for Business. Free Guide. platforms.


Tectonic Shift

Viral growth no longer means frequent news feeds or spammy invites. Instead, it's a more developed player request that's embedded with progress mechanics. Monetization has gone from a fragmented, company-specific currency to an ecosystem of native Facebook credits. As a result, developers are retuning their games and earnings expectations around this new, 30 percent revenue share model.

With all of these rapid platform changes, a shifting advertising ecosystem, and the blossoming of new game engines and genres, analytics companies have had to keep their finger tightly on the market pulse in order to correctly anticipate the next level of visibility and insight.

From optimizing around virality (K-factor) a year ago, the focus has shifted to engagement and retention optimization, as we see games with deeper engagement narratives pushing the envelope in leveraging custom behavioral insights to create games with ever-increasing average revenues per user. This raises the bar for everyone in the space and leads to higher quality game experiences that benefit the entire industry.

Social Gaming Evolution²

Facebook's success as a social gaming platform means more and more competitors are actively working to accommodate social game developers and their ad budgets. Google+ is currently the latest potential rival to Facebook, both as a social network and as a social gaming platform.

Mobile social networks like Openfeint are attempting to create networks within the fragmented mobile ecosystem. Venture capital keeps flowing into the industry with new studios popping up almost every day.

Industry veterans from traditional game companies are jumping ship, recognizing the new epoch where both the medium and the means players have for influencing the development and direction of their experience are completely unlike anything the industry has ever seen before.

Social and mobile game companies are also witnessing an explosion of data that's both technically challenging to process and intellectually challenging to translate into smart business decisions. Critical, real-time decisions now mandate seeing games not as a product but as a service -- a service that is constantly tweaking and optimizing the user experience for both new and existing players. Developers must quickly make sense of this data deluge in order to successfully iterate and capitalize on opportunities arising from user behavior.

The Evolving Social Web

As fluency for interpreting sizeable data sets increases, so will the number of events a developer will want to measure in gaming applications. Analytics must adapt to this fluency, to begin commensurately scaling for these new and unforeseen demands.

Many big data companies will try to step in to provide these services, recognizing that whether it is a social game, website or an application on a PC, smartphone or tablet, they must go where the users are going in order to build a holistic and accurate picture of cross-platform user behavior.

As more non-gaming companies perceive how Zynga leverages sophisticated analytics for data-driven design and optimization, the demand for similar analytics platforms will explode. Mobile devices are the next arena where exponential growth is already happening and companies have already introduced products specifically built for the mobile developer.

Successful social analytics companies will continue adapting. They will move beyond the on-demand dashboards to provide not only the infrastructure that handles the next generation of social Web data but also the common-sense best practices for executives navigating this new, opportunity-filled field.

For far too long, the Web has struggled to make sense of users by applying metrics that were mere proxies of player behavior. As the social Web expands, a paradigm shift based on previous user behavior metrics will follow. The analytics company that best packages, distills, and helps its clients understand how to better monetize users within the paradigm will gain the biggest share of this new market.

Accessible and actionable insights; these are the goals analytics companies must achieve in this evolving Web ecosystem. We must reach beyond page views into user behavior to better understand what drives people to play and interact within their games and their social and interest graphs.

We must deliver flexibility for measuring user behavior, while also delivering the best practices discovered in our years of research and data mining that organizations can interpret and act on.

Finally, we must move with the social graph as it progresses from its social network beginnings into the wider Web. By doing so, we will be where people buy and share real-world items on their PCs and mobile devices, while also acting as a catalyst for discovery and influence through these shared interests. In short, companies need to understand their users -- and we need to understand what companies need to know about their users. After all, we're in this game together.

Internet » What Would Linus Do About GNOME 3? Why, Use Xfce

"It really seems that OS designers in general, and window manager designers especially, have forgotten what an OS is for: to allow me to get work done," said Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack. "Fancy 3D spinning cubes to change virtual desktops might amaze other people, but they are actually SLOWER than just having the desktop switcher on the bar. Xfce seems to get this."

Debates are always plentiful here in the Linux blogosphere, and the topic of desktop environments is no exception.

That may be more true now than ever before, in fact, thanks to GNOME 3, which has come to rival only Unity in the controversy it has caused.

It's one thing when a mere mortal user criticizes GNOME; however, it's quite another when none other than Linus Torvalds does. Yet that, it seems, is just what recently happened.


'Why Can't I Have Shortcuts?'

"The user experience of Gnome3 even without rendering problems is unacceptable," wrote Torvalds in a conversation late last month on Google+. "Why can't I have shortcuts on my desktop? Why can't I have the expose functionality? Wobbly windows? Why does anybody sane think that it's a good idea to have that 'go to the crazy activities' menu mode?

"I used to be upset when gnome developers decided it was 'too complicated' for the user to remap some mouse buttons," Torvalds added. "In gnome3, the developers have apparently decided that it's 'too complicated' to actually do real work on your desktop, and have decided to make it really annoying to do."

As an example of "the crazy," Torvalds cited the predicament facing a user who wants to open a new terminal window.

'That's Just Crazy Crap'

"So you go to 'activities' and press the 'terminal' thing that you've made part of your normal desktop thing (but why can't I just have it on the desktop, instead of in that insane 'activities' mode?)," he griped. "What happens? Nothing. It brings your existing terminal to the forefront.

"That's just crazy crap," he added. "Now I need to use Shift-Control-N in an old terminal to bring up a new one. Yeah, that's a real user experience improvement. Sure."

In short, blaming those and other "head up the arse" behaviors in GNOME 3, Torvalds has switched to Xfce, he said: "I think it's a step down from gnome2, but it's a huge step up from gnome3. Really."

'I Agree with Linus'

It took a few days for the news of Torvalds' comments to hit the wires of the Linux blogosphere, but once it did, "crazy" is a fair description of the speed at which it traveled. In no time at all, the topic dominated all others at every bar, saloon and watering hole in the Linux blogosphere.

Luckily, Linux Girl was ready, Quick Quotes Quill in hand.

"I agree with Linus here," opined Chris Travers, a Slashdot blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project. "GNOME 3 is an unholy mess. The interface requires too many clicks to find things and without 3D acceleration it is hardly usable. The GNOME 2 interface was good; GNOME 3 is both awkward and clunky."

Still, "it is nice to be reminded by Linus that we have a choice," Travers added. "I expect to help bring this choice to more of my Linux-using friends."

'A Beast I've Never Tamed'

Slashdot blogger yagu took a similar view.

"I don't care much what Linus does or doesn't do," yagu told Linux Girl. "But I must agree Gnome is a beast I've never tamed."

The proliferation of Linux desktops "blesses with choice," yagu added. "I choose simple. It took me a long time to leave Tom's Window Manager (twm), and I was long happy with FVWM (no idea what that stands for). Both were simple, functional, and highly configurable window managers, and I could basically create my own desktop experience."

'Noisy, Annoying and Distracting'

The "high octane desktop experience," on the other hand, "I find only a modest leap for many of the reasons Linus gives for dropping Gnome 3," yagu went on. "Highly textured and layered, these uber-window managers are interesting other choices for users, but I find them mostly noisy, annoying and distracting. Eye candy is nice but doesn't contribute to my productivity at the end of the day."

Yagu now uses KDE. He finds it "mostly functional," he noted, but "would beg off were it not for some apps I find necessary which require KDE to run.

"Therein lies the rub," yagu concluded. "I don't want technology bleeding into all of my activities to the point that I must run some monster to do simple tasks. Gnome seems to have always been that monster for me."

'I Love Xfce'

GNOME 3 is "going in a direction people don't want to go, where the set 'people' includes Linus," Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza opined.

"I opted for Unity, so even people who like eye candy are dodging GNOME 3," Espinoza added. "I don't know where I'm going next; perhaps I'll go back to Enlightenment just to be contrary."

Consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack, meanwhile, is an Xfce fan.

"I love Xfce and have been using it for years," he told Linux Girl.

'It Just Works'

"It really seems that OS designers in general, and window manager designers especially, have forgotten what an OS is for: to allow me to get work done," Mack pointed out.

"I don't want the single most used software on my system (the WM shell) to be written in an interpreted language," he added. "Fancy 3D spinning cubes to change virtual desktops might amaze other people, but they are actually SLOWER than just having the desktop switcher on the bar.

"Xfce seems to get this," Mack said. "It's written in a compiled language, the interface is light and it has just enough eye candy to look nice (shadows, etc.). I dump the dock thing and have as many menu bars as I want. Dual monitors are handled well."

In short, Xfce "just works and is efficient enough that I still have plenty of CPU/RAM left to get actual work done with my system," Mack concluded.

'If It Ain't Broke...'

Slashdot blogger hairyfeet marveled that Linus was ever using GNOME to begin with.

"Isn't Gnome the 'we know what's best for you' desktop?" hairyfeet pointed out. "It would seem like a kernel hacker would want more control than that."

In any case, too often in the world of FOSS developers seem to follow "the 'If it ain't broke we'll break it!' design mantra," hairyfeet opined. "Is a world without bling like a world without sunshine to these guys?"

In the cases of both KDE3 and GNOME 2, for example, "you had well-vetted, well-maintained, low-resource code that most of the major bugs had been worked out of," he explained. "So what happened? Did seeing Aero and the latest OSX builds just cause everyone to be so dang bling-deprived they couldn't wait to toss stuff away?

"Slow and steady wins the race," hairyfeet concluded. "If it ain't broke, DON'T FIX IT!!!"

'They Have the Choice'

Blogger Robert Pogson, on the other hand, took a higher-level view.

"GNOME 3, like Ubuntu's Unity, is change for the sake of change," Pogson told Linux Girl.

Still, "if the users don't like it, they have the choice to use other interfaces," he added. "Linus and I both like XFCE4. It gets the job done and lets me do what I need to do."

Some people "do dangerous things; others do boring things," Pogson pointed out. "There's no explaining what people are motivated to do."

Nevertheless, "as long as we have plenty of choice and the freedom to change things, it's OK with me," he concluded.

Internet » Is Social Networking's Honeymoon Nearly Over?

"I think that the reason [privacy] is not such a big topic -- or hasn't been in the past -- is that we're still in the honeymoon phase ... . People love sharing snapshots of their lives, letting people know what they've been up to, connecting, networking, socializing with old friends, old flames -- meeting new people. It's very fun -- it's very exciting. It's all about instant gratification."

Technology analyst Scott Steinberg answers the question, "Why is it that privacy is not a huge topic in social media?"

The recent launch of Google+, which offers users a convenient way of managing who gets to see what, addresses the social networking 6 Ways to Use Social Media for Business. Free Guide. privacy issue to an extent. However, the vast majority of Facebook's multitudes are still not terribly concerned -- they're having too much fun.

There's a need to pay more attention to privacy, though, and Steinberg is confident that social networkers are awakening to that fact and becoming less blase about the potential ramifications of sharing so much of their personal lives online.