e-commerce – Stay N Alive

SocialToo is Proud to Launch With OneForty’s New App Store

Oneforty_logoIn an unprecedented move, Laura Fitton’s OneForty.com launched their own app store for Twitter today, enabling Twitter developers to finally have a platform to sell and promote their apps in a single location, to a large audience.  The company, with apps that you can purchase for Twitter, will become like iTunes or even Amazon, in enabling developers to sell, and Twitter app seekers to find and purchase, in a virtual Twitter marketplace.  My startup, SocialToo, is proud to be one of the companies launching with OneForty in this effort.

We know with the launch of the iTunes app store that bringing developers to a single location that others can search, find, and purchase apps, has proven to be a lucrative business for developers.  This launch will make Twitter itself a similar breeding ground for new entrepreneurial ideas and business opportunities that were previously not thought of.  The completion of an app store is the icing on the already baking Twitter ecosystem cake that should seal the deal for many entrepreneurs and developers in why they should write Twitter apps.

What can you purchase from SocialToo?

Until now you have already been able to purchase several features on the SocialToo website – those include the ability to unfollow everyone you’ve followed on Twitter at once, catching up those who followed you before joining SocialToo that you want to follow back, along with a powerful daily e-mail that includes stats as to who followed you and stopped following you the previous day on Twitter.  In fact, we just announced an affiliate program which enables anyone with a Twitter account to gain a cut of the revenues just by sharing with their friends on Twitter!

With today’s launch with OneForty, we are starting by allowing users to purchase our daily stats e-mail that sends you a digest of who followed you and who stopped following you the previous day on Twitter.  Because our current services are one-time for life, it gives us a unique opportunity to offer one-time purchases like this on 3rd party sites like OneForty.  The specific stats e-mail we’re offering on OneForty sells for just $20, and you get it for life.  In fact, because you’ve already given your e-mail address to OneForty, once you’ve purchased, you don’t even have to ever visit SocialToo.com (although we always appreciate the visit!) – you’ll start receiving stats e-mails the very next day.

I’m excited for this new development.  OneForty has already proven to be one of the best ways to find apps in the Twitter ecosystem.  It can only get better now as developers are able to now start monetizing their offerings through the directory.

So if you get a chance, go on over to OneForty and try out the SocialToo stats e-mail.  Be sure to leave us a review!  This is an incredible opportunity I’m proud to be a part of.

Facebook Takes a Page Out of iTunes With "Credits Enabled" App Directory

FacebookWhat has been speculated for awhile now seems to be out in the open.  Facebook is rolling out what appears to be an iTunes-esque version of the Facebook Application directory, in which users can easily find and purchase from “credits-enabled” applications.  The feature was recently enabled on my Facebook profile, and after clicking an option titled, “spend credits”, appears to take you to a directory of “credits enabled” applications where you can use your Credits and purchase from applications supporting the method of payment. All users appear to be given a default of 5 Credits to start out with.

Clicking through to the applications, you are required to install them first, and then within the applications that are credits-enabled you can purchase things within the application with your credits.  For example, the Social Calendar application enables you to purchase virtual “gifts” to send to your friends for various events. Purchasing the item deducts credits from your account.

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Credits cost 10 Credits for $1, and can be purchased either via links in the applications, or via the drop-down at in the header navigation menu of Facebook.  Becoming a “credits-enabled” application would appear to be a closed process at the moment, as Facebook has yet to make any announcements to developers yet, nor have they published any documentation on their wiki.  It will certainly be interesting to see how developers embrace this when they do make it open, and what types of business models people are able to create through the new model.

Facebook, it would appear, is soon to embrace a new business model on top of their already ad-based system. I’m really excited to see how this plays out, and if we’ll see some of the big e-commerce players begin to embrace it (imagine what Amazon could do with such an integration).  Here are some more screenshots:

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Potential Applications of Facebook Connect in E-Commerce

n_1186439527_logo_facebook-rgb-7inch-1.pngI’m way too late on this, since it’s been mentioned several times already, but I thought I’d share a little presentation Jesse Pickard and the Razorfish guys did that I had the opportunity to help out on. Jesse asked me several questions about Facebook Connect a few months ago, and he turned it into this excellent presentation on potential uses of the platform for E-Commerce. In it, he uses iTunes, the iPhone (I still predict that’s coming – I always have, as has Facebook), and Amazon all as examples of potential integration points for Facebook Connect. These types of services have tremendous potential to see maximum success from integrating social networking into their own e-commerce platforms. They do risk some privacy, but that’s the advantage of Facebook – they are one of the few services out there which allow for privacy controls of their users, and they are only getting better at it.

I’d really like to see more e-commerce organizations embrace Facebook Connect. If I can be of help in doing so, please contact me! You can read more about it via the presentation Jesse Pickard made:

Portable Social Graphs – Imagining their Potential[swfobj style=”margin:0px” width=”425″ height=”355″ src=”http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=fbconnectrazorfish-1228360493956517-8&stripped_title=portable-social-graphs-imagining-their-potential-presentation” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”]

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: retail marketing)