With the explosion of e-Commerce has come the hunger for real consumer feedback- social media, and more specifically, Twitter, have satisfied that craving like nothing else!
What makes Twitter such a great powertool for consumerism is its focus on
real-time conversation. When you do a keyword search in Twitter, for, say, the
iPhone, you'll instantly see dozens of tweets from people discussing the iPhone.
On Friday,
Adam Ostrow discussed on the social media blog, Mashable, a recently launched site that will take the marriage between e-Commerce and social media to the next level.
JustBought.it, a recently launched service, is apparently 1/3 Twitter, 1/3 TwitPic, 1/3 Google maps- three handy-dandy services that have revolutionized the way we interact and share content online.
According to Ostrow, JustBought.it "encourages users to tweet whenever they've ‘just bought something' (get it?) with a picture of the product and the location where they purchased it."
With these user-generated contributions, JustBought.it it hoping to build a "community of Twitter shoppers."
- Thanks to OAuth technology, shoppers can login to JustBought.it with their Twitter info, which nicely eliminates the need to remember yet another username and password.
- After you login, Justbought.it displays purchases made by other members in your general area. You can view all purchases as they occur in real-time, or sort purchases by category, such as shoes or apparel.
- Each purchase is accompanied by a Google Map showing the shopper's location, a photo of the purchase item, the name of the item, the avatar and handle of the shopper, a timestamp, and the hashtag #justbought to make the tweets easy to find.
A mobile app would be essential to helping JustBought.it really take off- according to Ostrow, a JustBought.it iPhone app is in the works and should be ready to go in about two weeks.
JustBought.it founder Adarsh Dilip spoke more of the future of his service, sharing with Ostrow that "the site will move beyond Twitter and implement Facebook Connect as well."
JustBought.it also hopes to build its fan-base by "swinging white label deals with big online retailers, who would enable JustBought.it tweets whenever consumers buy something."
I see the tremendously cool concept of JustBough.it, but when I read that last detail in Ostrow's article, I couldn't help but recall
the Beacon debacle that generated a lot of negative feedback for Facebook. Beacon, you may recall, was Facebook's attempt to incorporate e-Commerce with its powerful social networking interface.
When members made purchases at certain online stores, such as Fandango and Overstock.com, Facebook published a news feed sharing that purchase with the world. Some shoppers were horrified, claiming Facebook was committing obvious invasions of privacy, mostly because the opt-in feature was automatic, and the opt-out option was slightly camouflaged. Facebook has since pulled the plug on Beacon... well, promoting it at least. Sheesh.
What I like about the concept behind JustBought.it is that it's purely conscious user contributions. If you bought something and you want to share it with the world, you use the service. Nothing sneaky about that... well, not yet...
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