I am still wading through all the New Year predictions, but this one caught my attention. Jay Deragon thinks that 2008 may be the year that businesses figure out a way to build commerce engines on top of social networks:
There's been a lot of progress made in 2007 in social commerce and 2008 will see new players, new technology and lots of money thrown at the solutions. Social commerce can encompass and influence a wide array of points on the purchase process, both before and after, and markets will move where money moves.
I generally agree, but if 2007 provided any lesson to social-media folk, it's this: mining the "social graph" is not a trivial thing. Social rules prevail in social environments, and I have not seen a lot of intelligent thinking in the world of social networks/e-commerce.
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