Miscellaneous news on social shopping and shopping engines (2007-03-31)

(I’m in San Francisco till the end of next week, don’t have much time to blog, but here are a few links)

• On DmNews: Online shopping is something to talk about.
  

  Larger brands have also benefited from the social shopping sites. “When the iPhone was launched in real time we saw more than 100 people add iPhone to their profiles,” Mr. Chandra said. “This can be a great way to gauge the interest in new products.”

• In Time Rich & Time Poor, comparison engines are for the “time poor” users while social shopping sites are for the “time rich”:
  

  Broadly speaking, there are two types of internet users, Time Rich and Time Poor [...] Time Poor people use the internet to get things done. [...] Great examples of websites built for the Time Poor include search engines, first gen comparison shopping engines (trying to find the lowest price as quickly as possible) [...] Time Rich people use the internet to kill some time. [...] Time Rich include [...], social shopping sites (recreational shopping)

• Read on Wize Blog (Wize is a review aggregator for products), The Evolution of Shopping compares the shopping experience on the net, between web 1.0 and web 2.0:
  

  Web 1.0 revolved around creating store shelves that resembled our offline world [...] The next step in Web 1.0 was the evolution of comparative shopping where you could find many places that sell things at once and compare prices between each place quickly [...] The shopping experience in Web 2.0 will be based on matching needs identified by people rather than pushing what’s available in the sales channel, causing the sales process to become an experience that is shared between consumers, rather than between consumers and salespeople.