The increasingly popular online shopping site Thefind has finally found a way to connect with Facebook -- without being creepy.
It's not a technical breakthrough -- plenty of sites now work with Facebook to let users log-in -- but Thefind has been grappling with how to integrate with Facebook in a way that's relevant and privacy-respectful.*
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*'The idea behind the face is that the person you know is an ambassador'***The company even invited Wired.com to sit in on its internal discussions this spring about how the shopping site might integrate with Facebook users profiles, how it could mine them and what just felt creepy. Those conversations happened as Facebook experienced a massive backlash over its privacy changes, including a system called Instant Personalization, which automatically turned your profile data over to Yelp and Pandora if you visited their sites while still logged into Facebook.
Thefind largely shelved its plans -- basically, waiting out the storm and seeing if Facebook would grow up a bit. (For the back story, see "The Inside Story of How One Company Didn't Mine Facebook".
On Thursday, Thefind turned on its first real use of the Facebook log-in. Those who choose to login using their Facebook accounts give the site permission to see their profiles and their friend profiles. Thefind then matches up the pages and stores and brands you've liked or become a fan of on Facebook, and lets you add them to the list of brands and stores you like on Thefind. Your search results are then adjusted so that items from the stores you like, whether that's Target or a designer boutique or both, show up more prominently in your search.
But more intriguingly, when you look at an item in Thefind's results, you can use the Facebook "Like" button to say you like a certain brand or a store. You can also see tiny profile pictures of your friends who like a store or brand, and how many people total on Facebook like a brand or store. The key, however, is that those "Like" buttons aren't liking a profile page or brand on Thefind — they are tied to the retailer or shoe company's fan page on Facebook.
"The idea behind the face is that the person you know is an ambassador," said Ron Levi, a vice president at theFind. "There's a little reinforcement for a retailer [who has the Facebook widget] when people come to their fan page or website."
"But with theFind, now 'Likes' work to the retailer's advantage," Levi said.
Thefind is calling their implementation of the buttons -- "Like Love," a reference to the netiquette practice of linking to other people's websites and stories, even if that costs you some of your Google link juice. There's no current way to "Like" a product, in part because there's no Facebook pages for individual products, and partly because, as the Levi puts it, products are ephemeral while taste is not.
What's the benefit for Thefind? Well, for one, driving more purchases. Shoppers are often looking for a reason to buy -- one of the reasons that reviews, even negative ones, are so popular with online retailers is that they help a user validate their inclination to buy. Seeing a picture of one of your friends as someone who likes a lesser-known brand or online retailer will likely persuade you to buy. And even if you don't have friends who like a store, knowing that a decent number of people on Facebook do can serve the same purpose.
The other benefit is that helping stores, especially niche stores, gain Facebook friends and making those friends useful is likely to increase goodwill between stores and Thefind -- which is crucial because Thefind makes its money from retailers voluntarily paying the company for good traffic, in exchange for a small bump in their rankings in Thefind's results.
As for, users who want a personalized shopping experience without feeding data into Facebook can still do so using Thefind's own personalization service, and users can choose to mix and match -- say putting a boutique lingerie store into Thefind's system so as not to tip off your wife where you find thoughtful gifts -- while "Liking" other stores. Thefind is also including a tutorial on how to customize Facebook's privacy settings for the pages you like.
Of course, once you've connected Thefind and Facebook, it's an ongoing relationship. If you join the two and then end up later becoming a fan of new stores and brands, Thefind will be notified and add them to your profile (this currently isn't happening, but it's a small technical fix that should be in place in a few days).
But Thefind is clearly spending time thinking about their customers, their privacy and the net's ecosystem. (And without sounding grandiose, perhaps Thefind is also concerned what Wired.com thinks, since after having invited me inside their To Facebook or Not to Facebook meetings, I wrote a very popular post about how Facebook had gone rogue).
Thefind is also showing off a feature called "Shop Like Me," which displays results exclusively from the stores you've liked (instead of just bumping them up in the results as in the main window). While currently that's private feature, Thefind is very interested in the idea of tastemakers, so that in the future, you could opt-in to being public so that people could decide to shop through your prism. One can imagine being able to shop like the eclectic crew at BoingBoing or like a digital photography expert or your favorite Project Runway designer.
Given that Thefind gets paid for driving good traffic to shopping sites, it's not implausible that they could share the wealth with those who set up popular shopping profiles.
But for now, you can now turn use Thefind to use your Facebook profile to make your shopping more personalized.
And to Thefind's credit, it doesn't feel creepy.
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