How many of you women love to shop?  Or men for that matter?

When I was a young boy, my mother and three older sisters would get up early on Saturday morning and go shopping.  This wasn't just any short trip to the mall.  This was an all day event.  We lived in Bremerton, WA on the west side of Puget Sound.  We would first stop in the downtown Bremerton stores, then drive to Tacoma and visit the Tacoma Mall, then continue the circle over to Southcenter Mall near Seattle.  We would decide whether to continue onto downtown Seattle for more shopping and a late ferry ride home (and a stop at Ivar's fish bar) or drive back and get a particular dress, skirt or whatever in a mall we stopped in earlier in the day.  Needless to say I wasn't always happy to be drug along on these shopping excursions.  Hanging out in the gully across the street from my house would have been just fine.

However, one of the lessons I learned from that has stuck with me.  Shopping is a social experience.  "Shop till you drop" and "no pain, no gain" actually do go hand in hand.

Well, Amazon took a large step forward last week in making online shopping a social experience.  If you missed it, Amazon just released two applications that tie Facebook into the Amazon shopping experience.  One known as "Giver" allows you to see other Facebook user's Amazon wish lists - and to make a purchase from Amazon in order to satisfy that wish.  Isn't that nice...?   The second is called "Grapevine" and it automatically updates your friends on Facebook whenever you write a product review on the Amazon site.  Another nice little "news feed" to your friends.

These are noteworthy developments for every marketer that sells products through Amazon or perhaps on their own storefront.  If you sell products direct, wouldn't you like to have this kind of capability?  I certainly would.

Naturally, I'm thrilled to see this because one of the designs we've been working on lately uses Facebook to create referral business for adventure travel and eco-tourism operators.  Like Amazon we share a high amount of enthusiasm for social networks - especially those that provide external hooks for developers that want to improve the sales and marketing process.  I don't know about you, but I find it's really, really hard to ignore an audience of 100 million users.