Your holiday shopping days are quickly winding down… And the gift scramble is on! We’ve done the leg work for you and selected some awesome gifts priced under $25! Check out our team’s picks to make your holiday shopping easy and affordable. Finish crossing off your shopping list!
Congratulations to Matt Bordey our lead web designer here at Shopit, and his wife Daisy, on their new baby boy! Born on November 14th, please welcome… Noah Nicolai Bordey.
We’re up for nomination in Mashable’s Open Web Awards; an open, international contest for the best websites and services. Our category of course is ‘Favorite Social Shopping Site.’ We’d be honored to have your nomination! You can enter your submission below. Thanks for all your continued feedback and support this past year. We couldn’t be more excited about 09′!
The Shopit application that has become so popular with Facebook and MySpace is now available on the hi5 networks. I am a computer science student at the University of California, Los Angeles interning at Shopit and have been working over the past several weeks to bring this application to a true OpenSocial environment. OpenSocial initially had some stumbles but has now shown that it is capable of hosting robust and unique application experiences with easy portability.
The application provides users with a dashboard to view all the current incoming or outgoing orders, see the latest products, add or remove products, and even make purchases from start to finish all from within the hi5 network. This combination offers both a easy and friendly interface as well as a viral market for both buyers and sellers.
The biggest feature of any social application is sharing and with the Shopit application it is as easy as clicking share, selecting your friends, and watching your business spread. You can just as easily let your friends know when you’ve found a great deal. Save money on the products you need just by watching your notifications in hi5.
As an intern in a continuing learning experience I have found the development and testing of this application to be exciting. I was able to watch the power of the sharing features grow as I built them beneath my fingertips. The hi5 API is becoming more and more complete ever day as it moves towards OpenSocial 0.8 and a more finalized REST interface. Although I’m still awaiting a PHP client library.
Anyway, I hope everyone enjoys the application and finds those great deals. I will be heading off to explore Europe in my first backpacking experience next week. Thanks for your interest in my efforts. I’d also like to give a big thanks to Sameer and Eric, and the rest of the hi5 team for their continued help.
-Matt Snider
Ghosts and ghouls and all things scary have just a couple weeks left to perfect their costumes, pimp their graveyards, and craft their brews. So make sure you’ve got all your spooky garb, sweet stuff and eerie furnishings listed on Shopit. Get creative! You never know who’ll want to wear your homemade hamburger costume this year. And be sure to add keywords to help buyers find your items quick and easy, like ‘Halloween, Costume, Giant Hamburger’ And if you’re shopping for some last minute stuff, you can’t go wrong with the Shopit Halloween stores. Here are few with ideas for this holidays’ shopping:
We were so inspired by Rhett’s new attention grabbing look this week, we all decided to try it on for size. Worked for some… not so much for others. But the surprise of mustaches peaking over cubicles, hanging around the break room, and parading around the office was priceless.
Shopit was originally supposed to go up to San Francisco solely for the PorC conference (see post below), but then, we were invited to attend Yahoo’s Openhack08 conference! Sweet!
We hopped on a train and headed to Yahoo’s main campus in Sunnyvale, CA. We got there, registered, and attended the crash courses. Some of the topics covered in the courses were: Yahoo’s mobile platform Blueprint which let’s you easily build apps for the iPhone and other basic phones. OpenSocial, OAuth, and Y!AP.
After attending the Yahoo Application Platform (Y!AP) course, I got the urge to start up a Shopit hack for a possible entry into the openhack08 contest. I left my mouse at home but luckily Kent Brewster from Yahoo was kind of enough to lend me one so that I can move much faster.
I ended up successfully porting the Shopit application to the Yahoo Platform in about 4 hours. Yahoo has put together a really nice platform and made it really easy to port.
After deciding that we were not going to stay an extra day (which required us to sleep in tents or on the floor of classrooms), we did not enter our “hack” into the competition. Congratulations to cafe.com for winning openhack08.
Toward the end of the day, I sat in on a course taught by the one and only Rasmus Lerdorf (the creator of PHP). I felt like I should write him a check! 
We were then allowed to socialize a bit with some Pizza & Beer. Geek to Pizza is like Cop to Donut.
We headed home and caught a flight out of San Jose to LA. Surprisingly I ran into my cousin on the flight home and had a good time catching up.
All in all, it was a nice experience to mingle with some of the industry’s finest… and bitter sweet because although I was tired and wanted to head home, I would’ve liked to see where we would have stood in the contest… oh and I missed an awesome performance from Girl Talk!
You can see all pictures via flickr from the event here.
–Troy
Wednesday I had the pleasure of flying up to San Francisco, CA along with Rhett McNulty, Shopit COO, for a PorC (Portable Contacts) hackathon hosted by Six Apart. The plane ride was sick! We flew Virgin America. I watched TV, I played DOOM, and I even tried to chat with strangers via the Chat feature. Sadly nobody wanted to accept my chat invitation :(.
Once we got off the plane, we hopped on the BART and headed to the city. We walked several blocks to the Six Apart office — thanks to David Recordon for hosting — and started munchin’ on some of the best pizza I’ve ever had. Once we were plenty full, we got right to work hackin’ away on Portable Contacts.
At first we were having a few issues with the implementation but thanks to Joseph Smarr from Plaxo, we were able to get those all squared away.
I’m excited to fully implement all that PorC brings to the table. It makes my job as a developer really easy and provides a lot for the Shopit users to easily transfer their data from their existing profiles. For example, a user can come to Shopit and specify a social network like Plaxo and pull all of their data down with just a few clicks. This data can be used to present users with products that they would be interested in purchasing by cross-checking our database of products with a users interest that are stored on the Plaxo side!
After a long night of fun, hangin’ out in a very informal setting, we called it a night. We woke up and had coffee with some of Rhett’s buddies that happened to be driving through town. His Buddies Jared and Mike are traveling across the country: surfing, mountain biking, and kayaking for a few months. Living the dream. They were kind enough to drop us off at MySpace for the Portable Contacts summit.
The Portable Contacts summit was very informative. Joseph Smarr did a great job hosting the event and John McCrea did a great job managing it. Diving in together felt like we were all playing a key part in setting the tone for the future of the web. Because everything was so Open, we could do mashups of data without ever writing any code. For example, Kevin Marks from Google and Joseph took the hCard data from Kevin’s twitter page and converted it to a vCard using technorati’s hCard to vCard converter. They then used that vCard as a data endpoint for Portable Contacts. This is super important because the architecture of the PorC standard was to follow existing Open standards like the vCard which maps one-to one. Very cool.
We finished up the night with some good beer (Pacifico) and a lot of help from Paul Lindner from hi5 for a little hack session the two of us had to hammer out a few OAuth issues we were having with our soon to be release Shopit hi5 app. All is good. Thanks Paul!
Stay tuned, more to come. Tomorrow, we’re heading to Open Hack Day at Yahoo!
–Troy Payne (Social Apps guy)
I’m an avid reader of Get Elastic, The Ecommerce Blog. About a month ago, Get Elastic announced their first ever Big Ecommerce Conference Contest where entrants could win full conference passes to three different internet expos! (a valued prize for us internet geeks ) So I entered, although I’ve never won anything in my life. And as luck would have it, I won!!
Shopit will be attending Online Market World 2008 at the Moscone Center, San Francisco, October 1st- 3rd. The event is a comprehensive three-day conference to address the entire e-commerce life cycle from business, technology, marketing, and operational perspectives. Some of the KeyNote speakers include: Kathy Ireland CEO & Chief Designer, Kathy Ireland World Wide, Tony Hsieh CEO, Zappos, Marsha Collier Author, eBay For Dummies Series, Holly Eve Suttman Founder, Black and Light Co.
We’re stoked. Thanks Get Elastic. We’ll see you in October.
-Stephanie
Our brilliant app developer Troy, and our COO Rhett, attended the recent Web App Dev Meetup hosted by the kind folks at Mahalo Wednesday night.
The first event speaker was Eric Marcoullier, CEO of Gnip. Eric spoke about the Gnip technology, which is focused on reducing the pain of constant pinging to servers every 15 minutes for updates from data providers such as Flickr, Twitter, Mahalo, etc. Hoping to amplify focus on creating great applications instead of aggregating data.
The second, a great presentation from Chris Schalk and Kevin Marks, Google Developer Advocates talking about Open Social; seamlessly getting user’s information out to the rest of the universe through a common API for social applications across multiple websites.
The event was a success…free education, free networking, and free food. What more could you ask for in a meetup? Looking forward to the next!
