Do you wanna come shopping with me …. online ?

Plurchase is a brand new service from Ycombinator that will let you do exactly that. It’s currently in private and will be launching in a few days. Tom Saffell of Plurchase gave a sneek preview of the service at the New Tech Meetup at Palo Alto.

Plurchase let’s consumers shop on eCommerce sites like Amazon, Zappos and get feedback, advice from their friends using a sidebar widget.(They actually display the eCommerce site in an iFrame). You can bookmark products, search for products and share them on Facebook using Facebook Connect. They have also integrated a chat system to get real time advice from your friends. It currently supports only 3 eCommerce sites Amazon, Zappos, and Craigslist respectively.

Tom mentioned that they plan to make money via the affiliate program when a user/friend makes a purchase through their system. A typical payment in Amazon’s affiliate program ranges from 4 to 14%.

I am eagerly looking forward  to see the service go live and see it’s impact on online consumer spending. Leveraging the social graph of facebook(and maybe other newtworks) for online shopping seems like a smart move. You can follow them on twitter @plurchase for updates or read their blog here.

I have attached a few screenshots below

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Update: The site is live so go play with it.

Announcement: Monetization Meetup (May 18, 2009)

 

Peanut Lab’s is sponsoring a Monetization meetup at Google Hqrs on May 18th, 2009. 

WHEN

Monday May 18th 
6:30-9pm
Network for the first 30-45 minutes then have a few speakers speaking for 10-15 minutes each with Q&A time after each speaker.

WHERE

Googleplex (Bldg. 43)

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Tunis Conference Room
Mountain View, CA 94043

 

SPEAKERS

The speakers for the evening listed below will discuss best practices around monetization in their respective companies :

• Jonathan from EA
• Michael from Justin.tv
• Ali from Peanut Labs
• Sergio from Norwest Venture Partners
• Shanti from Three Rings
• Lars from Frogster
• Paul from (he’s too cool to be associated with any company… just yet) 

Hope to see you all there.

Guide to Creating a Virtual Economy for Social Applications

Anu Shukla, the CEO of offerpal media, gave a presentation at Myspace DevJam on building a virtual economy for engaging  social applications.  Offerpal media is a “Managed Offer Network” for social application publishers and online merchants. 

The Key points from the presentation are:

Name the Currency – The Virtual currency should have a name in the application.  It could be anything from “green bucks”, “chips”, “pet dollars” etc so that a user can relate to it with respect to the application.

Earn Currency – The user of the application should be provided with multiple different methods to earn the virtual currency and be a part of the system.  A few common  methods are:

1. Loyalty Rewards. (Logging In to Application)
2. Incentives to Invite New Users.
3. Complete Action/Activity.
4. Complete Offers from online merchants.
5. Real Dollars using Paypal.

 Redeem Currency – The user should also be given different avenues to redeem all the currency that they earned in the application. It helps to keep the economy healthy.

1.  Decorative Goods – These could be self expressive gifts. Ex: Clothes, Toys in the “Make a baby” application.
2. Virtual Gifts – The ability to gift other users a virtual product, as it leads to social interaction. Ex: Gifting Plants in the application “Green patch”.
3.  Functional Goods – These goods alter the user experience of an application. It could add more power/ability to the character in the application. Ex: Buying Virtual Weapons to enhance your chance of winning and defeating the enemy.

Promote Currency – The Application should promote the currency. A tab or banner add should be displayed to the user, so that they can easily find different ways to earn and redeem the currency

 Keep Economy Fresh – The economy should always be fresh so that the users have the incentive of interacting with the application and have a fun experience. This can be done by adding new goods, and innovative services to keep the interest level of the users always up.

Measure, Test, Analyze – The developer should always measure and tweak their application based on user behavior and their interaction with the virtual economy.

Update: Post by Anu Shukla on Tips.

Leverage Existing Successful Facebook Apps

 

The Facebook platform has been a great launch pad for creating an engaging and viral social application. Developing an application for Facebook has an instant benefit that you can potentially tap into the 50+ Million Facebook users. They provide some really good tools/api’s to leverage the social graph into your Facebook applications. A fairly simple to complex app can be easily written with the knowledge of only FBML (like HTML) & PHP. (They do support a bunch of other languages as well.) 

If you are wondering what is FBML? It is basically a mark up language similar to HTML that has tags that are specific to Facebook. The use of FBML makes your application development faster and with less server side code to perform simple tasks. It also helps to keep the feel and flow of Facebook in terms of colors, styles etc.  They have tags to get trivial information like name, profile picture to a complete implementation of a wall with the use of a simple FBML tag. The other advantage of using FBML is that they are fine tuned to get the date from Facebook servers efficiently and so the response time is faster, thereby making your application load faster.

I have used these tags in my favor to quickly create dashboards, invites, wall etc and gather other friend data to have the feel and look consistent with Facebook. Now imagine if I could also use a few Tags to get some data from the content rich and successful application iLike for an application that revolves around music artists. Guess What? … It has been announced today that Facebook has allowed application developers to share/use custom tags from other applications. It’s an extension of the existing FBML tags. Facebook has just made it even easier and quicker to create some content rich applications for their platform. 

Create Engaging Facebook Applications

Facebook announced their developer platform about a year ago in September of 2007.It generated a lot of interest in the developer community. A lot of applications were created and developed in the subsequent weeks/months.

These very first applications were basically simple implementations of some of the existing behavior/features that existed in facebook. A few that come to my mind are SuperPoke, SuperWall, FunWall, Send Hotness etc …

These applications became rapidly popular in part due to the fact that these were something new for the users to play with and also the inherent viral nature of the social network. A user could potentially invite all his friends to use the application and so on. However, this led to pile of applications that would make the users to spam their friends repetitively and grow the application virally. Facebook came soon took notice of the situation, and came out with metrics and tools to prevent such spam.

There is a general sense among new developers that its not easy to get your application viral with the strict policing of application behavior by facebook. This is not entirely true, because if you can create a genuine application that the users will enjoy, then it will grow virally. I have listed a few main areas that a developer can invest his time and design into to create an application that is engaging and providing a better user experience to the users.

Social Nature

The application needs to have a social nature built into it. It being part of a social networking site, it’s really easy to tap the social graph and link it to the application.You have to make sure that a user can relate to the content and similarly have his friends from the social graph relate to it.

I like to use’ Friends for Sale’ as an example. In this application you buy your friends and then it sends a notification to the friend that he/she has been bought by the user. The user can then login to the application and see their worth. He can in turn buy other friends or even the pets of his owners provided he has sufficient virtual currency.

Virtual Economy

You should design your application around a virtual economy. It will definitely help in monetizing your application once it gets viral. It’s a lot harder to come back and add the virtual economy to an app.

The Virtual economy will allow the users to earn virtual currency that could later be spent on virtual goods. The currency could virtually be used to purchase anything that would enhance the user’s experience of the application.

The user can earn the virtual currency in numerable ways. A few methods are to give the user an incentive for using your application on a frequent basis, thereby increasing the CPM value of the page. Other methods include, using actual dollars to buy the currency or giving the users the option to complete surveys in exchange for the virtual currency.

Competitive Behavior

It will also help if you can have some sort of a competitive nature built into it. The more the competition, the more addictive the application becomes. You need to expose the human nature of being competitive and be the best.

This could be tracked by either a leader board or the worth of a users virtual currency. The more power/previleges a user enjoys would give him an edge over his other friends and constantly keep the users on the edge to outdo the others.

In ‘Friends for Sale’, the more money you have the more number of friends you can own as pets. On the other hand, there is an application called ‘Green Path’, where you indirectly compete to save trees.

Strong Community

It’s a good idea to have a community built around the application. It helps a lot to have forums, walls, reviews built into the application. The more activity that application users perform, the close knit the community gets. This creates a sense of belonging to the users where they can interact with other fellow users.

Innovate

This is one of the critical aspects of having a successful applications on the facebook platform. You have to make sure that you listen to the users and steer your development based on the feedback. The mantra should be to give the users what they want. If you can keep them happy, they will come back to you again and again.