Venturebeat article about the growth of visual shopping search service Like.com

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Amazon adds more features to widgets

Since launching affiliate widgets in september last year, Amazon announced today that affliates have created over 200,000 of these nifty web 2.0 marketing small-wonders already.

“Many of you came back with great suggestions and we’ve picked the most requested features and implemented them in this release.”

Amazon also announced today the addition of various new features that are being added to associate widgets starting today. Some of these new features include:

• Shuffle Products: While building ‘My Favorites’ and ‘Slideshow’ widgets, associates can now select the Shuffle Products option to show your products in random order each time the widget is displayed. one can also go to My Widgets and enable this option in previously saved widgets
• Default Search Term: With the new ‘Use default search term’ option in the Search widget you can specify a search term that will be used to populate the Search widget when it is first displayed. Remember, you can always add a default search term to previously saved widgets by going to My Widgets and editing your saved Search widgets
• Delete Widgets: Is your My Widgets page cluttered with widgets that you no longer use? Use the delete icon besides each widget on the My Widgets page to permanently delete unused widgets
• Tracking Ids: Monitoring your widgets with custom Tracking Ids has never been easier. You can now easily change the tracking id associated with each widget by locating the widget on My Widgets and clicking the change link in the Tracking Id column.

Power to affiliate widgetry!

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A Web 2.0 way to track shipments for online shoppers

You love shopping online, in fact, you buy online all the time. That’s cool, but because online shopping also means having to keep a track of the shipments of your orders, it can be quite a headache at times.

G2web20.net, a web 2.0 apps directory, had a link to Trackmyshipments.com in their RSS feed today. TrackMyShipments is a free, online shipment notification aggregation service, by which I mean, it can provide to online shoppers, the ability to track their shipments in one place - instead of the websites of various shipping services - and - without the need to dig out tracking codes each time one wishes to track a shipment’s status.

The way this works is pretty simple. Shoppers need to forward their “Item shipped” notification emails from e-stores to the service, which then automatically uses the tracking codes in those emails to track shipments and update customers each time the status changes via email and/or SMS.

The TrackMyShipments’ algorithm extracts the shipper (eg Fedex) and tracking number automatically from the email without you having to do anything else.

After that you start to get email updates about where the package is, its status, its estimated arrival date etc. You never have to worry again about the status of your shipment.

I think this is a fantastic idea that online shoppers will love. I’m not sure how they plan to monetize their service. It’s free to use at the time, maybe a nominal fee for people with a lot of shipments to track or ads with SMSes and emails would be worth the kind of a service on offer.

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Google knows your friends, and your friends’ friends.

Google, today launched a new API, something that could be a revolutionary new tool for social apps and the social media in general — The Social Graph.

This latest API from google will allow developers of social apps grab what is normally the essential-most piece of a social-startup’s puzzle from the public web and that is the information of who knows whom. One way this can be used, according to google, is, for example if a new user signs up with your cool new social network — your network, thanks to the API, already knows whom that person knows and to how. So, all the friends of this new user who are already on your network, can automatically be in his/her buddy list there. Pretty cool huh?

I almost forgot to mention the most interesting part, All this, thanks to those ‘rel’ tags made oh so famous because of nofollow, in web links.

“Here’s how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF. When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they’ve said they’re friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site. “

Come to think of it, google has been, since the beginning, been using social graph data to make their SERPs look so good. however, the recent increased usage of XFN and FOAF data in these rel tags (XFN - the XHTML friends network and FOAF - Friend Of A Friend, are standards based linking meta-data mechanisms let you specify when you link to a URL, how are you related to the person who owns that URL) google has made it really easy for developers working on so many applications other than search to harness the usability of social linking.

More on: Google Code, Tech Crunch

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First(?) Widget ad spotted on CJ

No, Commission Junction hasn’t joined the cool affiliate networks and launched a widget advertising platform.

GAP, who have an affiliate program there, today announced something they call an AdPod - It’s a javascript that can be embedded to your website, and the widget will use meta-tags and keywords to dynamically display products and ads from gap that complement your web-page’s content; much like how adsense works with text-ads from google.

(more…)

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Google Sitemaps for Video - Making your videos more searchable

It’s already on techmeme, but if you missed it, Google has launched a way for webmasters to let them know if you have video content on your website.

No longer waiting for google to figure out that you host your own video, or uploading your content to youtube etc just so that it appears on google’s video search result pages. It is now possible to simply tell google to crawl your video pages for indexing into video.google.com and possibly also universal search.

More on the google webmaster blog > 

In our effort to help users search all the world’s public videos, the Google Video team joined the Sitemaps folks to introduce Video Sitemaps—an extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make your videos more searchable via Google Video Search. By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata

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Video Startup Ooyala Wins Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge

A few months ago, e-retail giant and web-services provider amazon announced that they would pay $100,000 in cash and offer investment in any startup that makes the best use of amazon’s web services in their business model.

The Result is here!

Ooyala has built a platform to deliver video content for publishers and targeted advertising via an interactive video experience. Ooyala is built on Amazon Web Services including Amazon EC2, used for video and analytics processing, and Amazon S3 for content storage and delivery. Ooyala leverages Amazon FPS to process both content and ad serving payments. Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon SQS are also utilized by Ooyala.

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Affiliate Window Gets a Blog

When Affiliate Networks start blogging, you get one additional reason to trust them a little bit more than you used to. It’s a cool thing for affiliate networks to have blogs, it means they are being transparent about their business and allow a forum where their customers - affiliates and merchants - can interact publicly with with network. I am sure you’ll all agree that one of the reasons we all love shareasale so much is because of it’s communication with the affiliate marketing community - they’re everywhere, on forums, twitter and their blog.

UK based Affiliate window, which already has a widget platform, an API, RSS feeds etc, is now the latest network to start it’s own blog, check it out here!

The official Affiliate Window blog has been launched! The blog will cover news and views from the Network, up coming events, new technologies, advice, comment and opinion about the affiliate marketing industry as a whole. All articles and features will be specially created by Affiliate Window staff from across the company, giving you a balanced, informative and interesting read. Already we have blogged about analysing programme performance, the recent AWin training event and our Website givaway.

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Linkshare updates API

Great news from linkshare today - they announced the merchandiser query tool that allows affiliates to use their REST based API to “just enter your search term and get the link you want”

From the announcement email:

As we continue our year of innovation, LinkShare is pleased to announce the release of a new Merchandiser Query tool that allows you to search for products within your Merchandiser data feeds. This API makes your life easier! No more digging for product links, just enter your search term and get the link you want.

Using a REST-based web service, the Merchandiser Query tool allows you to do a full text search for products that match keywords in any of the following categories:
* Product Name
* Primary Product Category
* Short Product Description
* Long Product Description
* Keywords

Finally, a GIANT leap forward by linkshare in the “programmable affiliate-web” department.

A PDF user guide for the API can be downloaded here…

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Yet another social shopping network acquired

Sugar, Inc, formerly known as Sugar Publishing, the online publishing company that publishes popular blogs targeted towards women has acquired a social shopping startup ShopStyle, reports Om Malik.

Today, the company decided to take the next step in its evolution and has bought Los Altos, Calif.-based ShopStyle, a social shopping site for an undisclosed amount of money. “We had content and community, and now we are adding commerce,” said Brian Sugar, CEO of Sugar Publishing. The company is also changing its name to Sugar Inc., in order to better reflect its broader focus.

The acquisition is seen as a move to make use of ShopStyle’s existing infrastructure and business model that is aimed at revenue generation to monetize the sugar network of blogs that currently lot as many as 5 million unique visitors a month.

More on GigaOM ->

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