…and that’s a good thing, IMO. Now wouldn’t the world be a wonderful place if only Adwords was also as welcoming to affiliates advertising on google.

a title=”Amazon sales up 17% this season…” href=”http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/26/at-least-amazon-had-a-good-christmas/”Details on this TechCrunch post…/a

img class=”alignnone” src=”http://library.corporate-ir.net/library/17/176/176060/mediaitems/93/a.com_logo_RGB.jpg” alt=”Amazon” width=”382″ height=”112″ /

Effective August 28, Affiliate network CJ will pay affiliates only once they have accumulated a minimum of $100 in commissions - in an effort towards eco-friendliness -  from the current minimum of $25, the new minimum direct deposit amount, however remains at $50. 

Smaller affiliates, especially in parts of the world where CJ doesn’t not provide a Direct deposit facility will have to wait longer to see their commission money.

The changes are as follows:

It’s good to see that CJ is showing concern towards the environment, but they should really think about providing direct deposit or paypal to countries besides the US, UK, canada and a few others. Affiliates in these parts of the world will still have to order checks.

Hurley said at an event in Palo alto that they are already integrating affiliate links to Amazon and iTunes within Music video and TV show videos

“We’re integrating links to iTunes and Amazon for DVDs, CDs, and digital downloads,” Hurley said. “A lot of our content does drive awareness for music or for TV shows or movies, and a lot of our partners are really just excited to make that connection between the two — going from promotional, getting people to tune into a TV show or buy a movie ticket — to that direct response in terms of clicking to buy something.”

More on NewTeeVee >

Users of Last.fm may have noticed that the web 2.0 radio is already doing something similar when you log in to the website to listen to music or watch videos, they’ve got affiliate links to amazon where users can buy the music.

BFAST, once part of Befree, a pioneering affiliate network, was sold to ValueClick in 2002 which later also purchased Commission Junction in 2003 and decided to integrate both the platforms under the CJ brand. One wonders what took VLCK so long to finally shut down the BFAST platform.

The Name CybaSumo is ‘Formed by
combining the Latin words cyba for “merchant” and sumo for “to buy,” ‘

CybaSumo, essentially is a widget platform for shopping. What makes it unique is the fact that merchants and individuals can use it to sell both digital as well as physical goods for 2.5% per sale.

Tomorrow, they will officially turn this website into a social-shopping platform by letting people buy and sell - in a widget that can be embedded into social networks of your choice.

If you are looking to log-in to the website to buy stuff, don’t expect much, the site only has about ten sellers at the moment, however, it’s great to see such platforms come up every now and then. As I have mentioned in quite a few earlier posts and comments, I think it is ideas like these that take web 2.0 to the web 2.1. The “contribution economy”, where all user-generated content is monetizable - for the users, where a website (or widget, or social-network) is simply a platform for users to not only create content on, but also make money from it.

In response to google’s post titled Building the Indic Web : The latter three languages are actually Dravidian languages, you can’t term them Indic! “Indic” refers to Indian languages of the Indo-European/Indo-Aryan family - The ones that use the Dev Nagri script or it’s derivatives. South Indian languages are a completely different family of languages. The term “Indic” refers to Sanskrit and it’s Prakrits, such as Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi (Funny how all prakrits end with an “i” as the last letter of the name of the language). This, obviously, does not include the four south-Indian languages - i.e Tamil, Kannada, Malyalam and Telugu. The only place to the south of India to use an Indic Language is Sri-Lanka with it’s non-tamil population speaking sinhalese which is very similar to Dev-Nagri.

This was probably because froogle would, at the time, crawl e-stores for price and product information and the index was anything but accurate. Since introducing google base, the product search engine has stopped crawling the web for product info, it instead relies on data-feeds submitted by merchants - in a manner much similar to Shopping.com, Shopzilla and other price comparison sites. Despite the added accuracy, few people actually use google’s product search feature independently of the top-three product listings that appear within universal search.

Now, again, google seems to be experimenting with the price comparison engine format, complete with one description, and product specs per product - which is great news shoppers - there is now a real price comparison engine that includes more buying options than any other out there. As for merchants, most of whom already have their datafeeds uploaded to google base, This would be one of the few price comparison sites that is completely free - merchants don’t pay for clicks or sales, and if your store offers competitive prices, all the better, expect additional traffic!

Not all searches are showing up as price comparison results, but more SERPs are changing their skin real quick. Probably not very long before the transition is completed.

“With today’s launch of TextBuyIt, any Amazon.com customer can now use any mobile device to shop and buy from Amazon.com, at anytime, anywhere they are”

How, Simply text a message to “AMAZON” (262966), with the name of the product (or UPC/ISBN, if you have those), search results - with product name, a single digit code, and prices - are immediately texted back to your phone. Reply to amazon’s reply with the single digit code amazon sent for the product that is to be purchased. That’s it! If it’s the first time you’re using the number to buy something you are asked your amazon.com account details from where amazon picks up your shipping and billing info, and calls you up to confirm the order)

There is a discussion going on here about the new service, the first few reviews seem positive. One of the comments made me think, we’re already into the ‘future’. “Imagine when you are wandering inside a BestBuy or circuitCity Store and really like some item and begin to wonder if you will find a better deal on Amazon… well, now you can just send an SMS and Voila!”

More on Text Buy It:
FAQs
Press Release

Update: Discussion also at Techcrunch

Carolyn Tang of SAS announced this to members of the shareasale group in facebook and is currently inviting ideas and suggestions in an ongoing facebook discussion here.

“we’re gettin’ with the times and exploring v-commerce. Nothing like bringing the magic of television online! Our tech team is hard at work developing a player with embedded tracking for affiliates to use on their sites.” ~ Carolyn Tang

Anyway, Today is an important day in affiliate marketing history. CJ has lost one of it’s biggest affiliate programs. e-Bay is going in-house. They announced this in an email to affiliates today that all the worlds ebays (including ebay US - Not including some of ebay’s non-auction properties such as stubhub, prostores, etc.) will need to be promoted via ebay’s own system beginning the first of April 2008.

“The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction. Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform. “

More details at the announcement page on ebay

Update: See also: AffiliateTip.com - Apparently, this was probably in the works since september 2006. See link on the affiliatetip post to “project rover”.

“By combining Amazon’s vast selection of products with Facebook’s millions of users, we are able to make activities like gift-giving more efficient and rewarding for Facebook users.”

In a news release earlier today, Amazon announced the launch of two new facebook applications - Giver and Grapevine. “Giver” lets users view their friends’ Amazon wishlists and share their own, “Grapewine” populates the user’s facebook feed with their activity on amazon.com (one gets choose what type of activity to share upon signing up).

“Use Amazon Giver to let your Facebook friends know and buy what you wish for, as well as gift suggestions, and Amazon Grapevine to show your friends what you’ve been up to on Amazon.com, such as writing Customer Reviews, adding items to your Wish List, and tagging products”

It would have been even more awesome if amazon had somehow added an affiliate marketing element to their facebook suite of apps. Say, if someone buys something on your wishlist by clicking on it - for someone else - you get the standard amazon associates revenue-share on the sale credited to your affiliate account. something like that would boost their apps’ usage and make social-shopping recommendations on facebook a lot more fun.

Utilizing the millions of members on Facebook, you can list an item and have it visible to all Facebook users instantly. After you list an item, others can post your listing on their Facebook page to earn commission! For example, if you sell a watch for $100.00, you may offer anyone 10% commission to sell it for you. If someone sells your watch for you, they get $10.00. The amount of commission you offer is entirely up to you.

They’ve also got widgets and stuff for embedding into blogs, but it’s the facebook potential of this thing that’s pretty huge. I’ll sign up and will probably write a review later this week. In the meantime, it’s a facebook application definitely worth a look whether you are an e-retailer or affiliate marketer or if you simply want to add cool products to your facebook profile, and make some cash in the process.

Not surprisingly, Jason’s general sentiment during the speech seems to be filled with hate towards the industry with statements like “Give up a life of crime”, “You are at the bottom of the food chain” and “Affiliate marketing is bullshit”, there couldn’t have been a worse affiliate summit keynote speech.

“Someone in this room could create the next digg, StumbleUpon, Flickr, etc. None of you probably will create these companies because you’re wired for the quick buck.” ~ Jason Calacanis

Clearly, Jason, who thinks all affiliates are spammers and haven’t added value whatsoever to the web doesn’t really understand what affiliate marketing is. Let me define it for you here jason. Affiliate marketing is the simple act of connecting a buyer with a seller, and it has added tremendous value to the web, and created bigger brands that you will ever dream of creating. Which brands? okay .. lets see .. Affiliate number 1. Ebay - connects buyers with sellers, takes a cut. 2. Google, Same thing, only more CPC. Shopping.com and shopzilla, etc - same thing. Smaller affiliates are also doing the exact thing in smaller, unique and niche specific ways. Jason, I had really hoped you’d have done your homework this time, everyone is tired of your same old hate-speeches.

It is true, some people in the affiliate industry need to do cleaner businesses, but Calacanis - by classifying every affiliate at the bottom of the food chain and etc, has been a total waste of an affiliate summit keynote.

Anyway, Amazon, it seems, has launched Product Ads - it will transform the retailer into a comparison shopping engine. Why there is no press release or an email about this, is something I have no Idea about, but apparently amazon is going to put product listings - from other retailers - on amazon.com and for a per click fee, direct traffic straight to these retailers’ websites, instead of buyers having to buy using amazon. This will eventually make amazon something very similar to shopping.com, price grabber, nextag, shopwiki, etc.

More on the story at: Tech Crunch, Comparison Engines, Redeye VC

“With Product Ads, as a seller you can participate in this cost-per-click program that allows customers to see YOUR products and price offerings. Customers viewing your products can click over to your website where they can buy directly from you.”

“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!

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.

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

It is true that I wasn’t posting much over the last few months, and the blog has become a not very active area of the web lately. Earlier today, I decided to change that.

I am going to re-establish my enthusiasm in blogging, reading (my rss feeds, that is), and participating in the social media in general.

To help with the blogging part, FinalTag has been upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 and decorated with “The morning after” - one of the best wordpress themes I have seen - created by my friend Arun Kale.

Did you know I mantain a link blog? I’ll be including content from there as”Asides” on this blog (Asides are tweet like micro-posts with or without a link that appear on the home page), so that will keep the blog alive even when I am not posting.

That’s it from me for now, Until the next post, Tata!