Pallian Creative

I’m social shopping and so should you! But, what is social shopping? According to this 2006 NYtimes article, social shopping is a new category of e-commerce that tries to combine two favorite online activities: shopping and social networking. When that article came out 3 years ago, myspace was THE social networking site. A lot has changed since then of course; twitter bloomed, myspace died and I’m entering the social shopping scene with my latest project - JustBought.it.

JustBought.it is a twitter based crowd powered shopping app that allows you to discover real-time deals and recommendations from your friends and followers. It’s got built-in GPS and google maps to make sure you get the most refined results. The idea originated over coffee with Boris Wertz of W Media Ventures, who’s also an investor. We wanted an app that allowed shoppers to quickly scan where the best deals were in town and to get instant feedback from the community. In short, we wanted to utilize the power of peer-to-peer credibility from the social web.

I’m now more likely to purchase a certain product based on that fact that someone I follow and respect on twitter just bought it - and it allows me to discover products I normally would have never found.

Our hope is that justbought.it allows small retailers and independent designers to acheive more visibility and reach a larger customer base through peer-to-peer social recommendations. Meanwhile, shoppers discover influential users, much like you discover new followers on twitter, who fill them in on smaller but cooler products or brands that they would have never discovered on a larger search engine.

Our initial version launches next week and we have a lot more coming soon, including an iphone app and an open API so other developers can come on board. If you can’t wait till next week and want to try out justbought.it today, send us a tweet with #justboughtit as a hashtag and we’ll send you a beta invite. You can also follow up updates on twitter by following @justboughtit

If you’re a big shopper… or run a blog on shopping, we like to hear from you. Please get in touch and lets take social shopping to a whole new level. Read & Discuss

Here’s the video from our panel at the 140conf on the future of twitter apps. The panel consisted of Iain Dodsworth of Tweetdeck, Jodee Rich of People Browser, Bernard Desarnauts of Tinker and myself. Adam Ostrow, Editor in Chief at Mashable moderated the panel. It was a jam packed 20 minute session and was hopefully helpful to anyone wanting to get into the twitter app development community.

You can also watch the entire #140conf “Director’s Cut” rebroadcast HERE.

Read & Discuss