Social Commerce

Dave McClure has written a really good blog post on Facebook novelties. Post is split it into three parts, into“3 Important Signs to recognize on your way to Enlightenment”. The first part is about Facebook Connect (Single Sign-on service), second about rumors on Facebook Payments and last is speculation on Social Commerce.

The last one is really similar to my thoughts on social media advertising. Idea is to let system recommend you different products and services, based on your and your friends interactions with different products, so you don’t have to think (or search).

Descriptive quote from Dave:

I’m the lazy-ass little pig that just wants to find out what the next guy is doing, do the same damn thing, & get back to watching YouTube and knock back a cold one.

To make things more interesting, it turns out that Google has patented mechanism for product recommendation. Smart folks at Google have thought of this a few years back - patent was filled in 2005.

Patent claims don’t explicitly mention social networks, there’s no “friends” in patent. It’s based on collecting data from user interaction with web retailers and then finding similar users and finally do the cross recommendation. Anyway, this recommendation magic could be easily plugged into Facebook.

Patent: Product recommendations based on collaborative filtering of user data