digg_url = 'http://digg.com/design/How_to_Combine_Social_Networking_and_E_Commerce'; In my opinion, there are two ways to combine social networking and e-commerce: 1) Create a social network around your products (Social commerce) 2) Market products to your social network (Modified traditional social networking) - #1 Social Commerce - In this first case, what you have is essentially a supercharged e-commerce store. You build your store as the focus of the site, and tightly integrate community features into it. For ...

I was just over at Thoof.com and something happened out of the ordinary. It sort of happened the other day too but this time, it was a little more intense. Here's the scenario - I registered for a user account at Thoof.com a couple days ago, and their registration process went like this: 1. Click sign up (a couple form fields appear) 2. Enter your email address 3. Click sign up That's ...

Want to create a successful social networking site? Here's 3 things worth keeping in mind: 1. Pay attention 2. Be creative 3. Be exclusive This article focuses on purely the social aspects which work for the leaders in social networking right now. I'll also point out some features of these sites which I think aren't working as well as they were originally intended.

I want to talk about some aspects of web design and usability. DOM / Ajax technologies are great in that they provide a super fast response to user action but if the user recognizes specific behavior, I believe they naturally come to expect other standard behaviors and so when something other than those expected standard behaviors occur, the user becomes less confidant that they can predict what will ...

I was having a conversation with my roomate this evening about web design. He's studying to become a grade school teacher so I always enjoy conversations with him where we can relate similar opinions to each other from different perspectives. So tonight I mentioned that I believe that every e-commerce site should integrate a community section on their site. Why not? E-commerce sites have built up a user ...