The slides for my Ecommerce lecture for MIS 311 are now available for download.

Note that if you view the slides in Powerpoint, that there are detailed notes for most slides in the “notes” area. These can be viewed in powerpoint, or you can print out the “notes” view of the slides to see them. The end of the slides includes many slides from previous versions of the presentation that have been removed for this term. You might find them interesting out of curiousity.

There is also a light reading list including both fiction and non-fiction sources that relate to this topic. I highly recommend the fiction books “Pattern Recognition” and “Rainbows End”

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them as a comment to this post (below) and I’ll be happy to answer them. You can also email if you prefer or use the contact information on my contact info page.

Interesting news from Google this week. They have annonced a new Social Networking API. It’s a way for programmers to create application for a wide variety of social networking sites. One set of programming tools for connecting many different social networking sites. Compare this to Facebook’s API: one social networking site, one set of tools. If you build a facebook app, it only works for facebook users. The Google “OpenSocial” API lets you build an app that will work for many social networks (Facebook and MySpace are not included unfortunately: Actually, OpenSocial is set to be announced officially today and there are already rumors that MySpace will join right away leaving Facebook on its own).

This is quite relevant to my e-commerce presentation. Recall that I talked about the past, present, and future of e-commerce. I claimed that the past was defined by a struggle to find ways to sell goods and services online (online stores). I then said that the present was dominated by advertising networks and I used Google as an example: Google is all about selling advertising (leveraging its search technology to do so). I then argued that the future of e-commerce lies in leverage (human) social networks (through social networking applications/technology).

Well, Google providing an API to multiple social networks fits quite well with that past-present-future model. If google intends to continue to make money selling ads, they need to leverage human social networks to be competitive. They could take the slow-route like Microsoft has: that is buy a chunk of Facebook to create a partnership to ensure they are on-board for any big changes. Instead they have made a lateral move and not tied themselves to any one social networking site: they’ve created a way to build apps for (potentially) ALL social networking sites. With this API they could then create new advertising platforms that could “gain traction” in multiple social networks.

I am lead to believe that the URL for Google’s OpenSocial will be http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial and will go live later today.

Yes, it turns out to be true: MySpace has joined Google’s OpenSocial. Via CIO.COM.
With so many other big social network applications supported by OpenSocial, this pretty much leaves Facebook all by itself in its own little closed world.

Well, my prediction that Facebook would begin to provide ways to let friends “sell” each out out through affiliate ad revenue schemes. They have announced to two Ad schemes, one of which (called Beacon) notifies your friends whenever you buy something. Yeah, your friends will receive an ad when you show interest in a product. No, you cannot opt out.

The other is a social ad program which encourage the viral spread of ads.

In general they are radically changing how they use the data you give them. Everything you do on Facebook will be considered data used to bring you more ads and to turn otherwise regular “content” into ads.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/06/liveblogging-facebook-advertising-announcement/