Optaros Labs

In this video from Carsonified‘s Future of Web Apps (FOWA) London conference, Mozilla Labs‘ Aza Raskin describes what he calls “You Centric Browsing“:

You-Centric: The Future of Browsing from Carsonified on Vimeo.

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We’ve been looking at various forms of social shopping for a while at Optaros, including the leverage of technologies like Facebook Connect in the context of ecommerce.

Why should shopping online be a solitary activity between a shopper and a site, when shopping in the real world is so eminently social?

This week a Magento extension developed at Optaros was finally released to the Magento community: Facebook Connect Social Shopping. (We’d been calling it Fangento, based on an early “Fans” concept plus Magento, but I like the official name better).

Essentially the extension allows you to leverage Facebook Connect in the context of your Magento-based eCommerce experience. Specifically, users can use their Facebook social graph to ask friends for (and recieve) recommendations about products:

Facebook Connect in a Magento context: Product recommendations from friends

From the overview blurb:

Facebook Connect Social Shopping (FCSS) provides your site visitors the ability to connect with their Facebook friends without leaving your ecommerce store. They can recommend to their friends a purchase that they are making or ask advice to choose between items to purchase. This will increase conversion rates on your site as well as pull in free traffic from Facebook through a direct contact from one of their friends – turning Facebook into a free, word-of-mouth affiliate. If friends are online on Facebook the interaction can be real-time.

I think the most intriguing part is the real-time possibilities – if your friends are actually online in Facebook you can ask them their opinion in real-time – essentially embedding a kind of Facebook chat into the shopping experience.

Can’t wait to see what experiences people (including Optaros teams but also others) build on top of this!