Amie St. has been known for its unique and dynamic pricing model for some time, but in choosing this fan-driven music site you used to have to give up access to much of the artists signed with major labels. That’s all about to change, as Sony is the first major label to introduce some of its bigger artists to Amie St. and it’s notable pricing structure.

If you recall, Amie St. is a music platform where artists can sell their songs and albums, but the price of their products are determined by the people. This means that the more popular your song is, the more expensive it becomes. Artists’ products start low and increase in price as Amie St. users purchase, download and recommend albums and songs.
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After shutting down its own video upload service and recommending Motionbox as an alternative, AOL has managed to find a way to actually partner with the company it suggested for video uploading and sharing. Motionbox has a new partnership with AOL’s recently acquired social network Bebo, to provide video storage, publishing and sharing services to its users.

If you’re a Bebo user, you may have noticed the transition messages via email and on Bebo’s website for the past month or so. Those that choose to use the new Motionbox-powered video services will be able to access basic membership features, enabling them to use online editing tools, secure storage and sharing options.
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trooQ is a recently launched social marketplace that rivals ebay in concept with its approach to interacting with trusted buyers and sellers. What this D.C.-based service does is encourage you to buy from trusted individuals based on the relationship you build with them within the trooQ community. The setup of trooQ itself is rather user-friendly, with an easy submission form for classifieds, and profile pages that list all a user’s available items.

Search queries can be sorted in a similar way that eBay search queries can be, by those items that are ending the soonest, among other filtering options. And while there’s a focus on the social aspects of trooQ, you can still offer feedback on users after interacting with them through buying and selling on trooQ’s marketplace. These ratings will be displayed on a user’s profile.

While this approach creates a different set of trust values than eBay’s ranking system, the concept itself is not new.
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I’ve always wondered if a marketplace for “used” music digital files would fly. There are some sites out there like GrooveShark which do support a marketplace for such activity, but it isn’t necessarily the primary premise of their service. Bethesda, Maryland based Bopaboo, however, has created a service that’s dedicated to the buying and selling of “used” mp3s.

This sounds silly to some, especially when you think about the word “used.” The files aren’t really “used,” and you’re not really transferring authorization to play an mp3 to another person since you get to keep your copy of the file. But with the $5.00 credit bopaboo gave me to try out the site, I was able to get the entire 808s & Heartbreaks album, along with about 10 other songs.
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I just got off the phone with Patrick Chanezon, the OpenSocial evangelist over at Google. I will be providing a podcast of our conversation later this week. During our conversation Patrick mentioned that he thinks e-commerce will start playing a larger role in social applications. I’ve written about this before on AllFacebook but for some reason it struck a chord with me this time around.

I keep wondering what incentive Google has to be involved with OpenSocial aside from preventing Facebook from being a dominant player. While developers can use the Adwords service to monetize their applications, this isn’t the best solution. I keep trying to figure out how these sites are going to generate substantially more revenue and the only thing that I can think of at this is point is e-commerce.

Facebook has already announced their intention to let app developers monetize through an e-commerce system but Google has yet to announce anything. While Patrick could not comment on it, it only seems logical for Google to expand Google Wallet to OpenSocial. This will hopefully provide the kick that they need to take on eBay owned PayPal.

While the social networking arms race continues, Google and Facebook will struggle to figure out more effective monetization strategies for these new channels. Google has the luxury of a multi-billion dollar war chest and a growing billion dollar advertising business, not to mention a thoroughly developed payment platform. Facebook has a massive amount of pressure from investors to increase monetization and an incomplete payment system.

As advertisers turn away from social advertising due to the inherent risks in lack of control over user-generated content, the only obvious remaining solution is e-commerce. I think it may be time to spend more time focusing on e-commerce and payment system integration instead of advertising solutions. What do you think? Is e-commerce (or “social commerce”) the future of the social web?

Caroline McCarthy has posted a couple articles over the past week about a number of social shopping sites that have raised new rounds of funding. As McCarthy wrote, StyleFeeder raised $2 million and then today ThisNext raised $5 million in a second round of financing from Anthem Venture Partners and Clearstone Venture Partners. This news emphasizes the increasing popularity of social shopping with venture capitalists and rising expectations of a future social shopping boom.

We have previously covered at least two social shopping sites and a search in Google for “social shopping” yields a wide array of competing sites vying for a piece of the pie. I would argue that most of these sites are going to crash and burn because they are missing one key component: sizable communities. A few of the sites, including ThisNext have attracted a relatively large audience but I would argue that they aren’t large enough to compete with the mainstream social networks that will eventually enter the social shopping space.

Facebook has clearly stated their intent to get involved with the social shopping market by providing developers access to their existing payment system: wallet. Once Facebook extends their payment system API to developers we are going to witness a massive spike in social shopping activity. Ultimately Facebook Beacon was the beginning of the site’s push to conquer the social shopping space which unfortunately for Facebook, resulted in a P.R. disaster rather than a technological revolution.

Over the next 12 to 24 months I would expect competition to heat up in this space as Facebook (and eventually MySpace and other social networks) begin to open their platforms and integrate e-commerce features. Do you think social shopping is the next big thing? Do you even know what social shopping is?

Despite early doubts of success, Zecco, the $0 commission trading platform and online investor community is thriving with 17,000 unique visitors every day and 95,000 members registered in the community. As long as your account balance exceeds $2,500, the free trading community gives you 10 free stock trades monthly ($4.50 for each additional) along with a slew of other benefits including low margin rates—for those of you whose middle name is leverage—and no minimum cash balances to open basic account or IRAs.

In addition to providing investors with a free, intuitive and comprehensive trading utility, Zecco gives users access to three crucial resources—namely, a community, quotes and research, and basic educational materials for noobs—to ensure smarter investment decisions. ZeccoShare, the company’s online community, is worth highlighting because it supports the popular business philosophy, “many are smarter than the few,” which seems to be influencing a number of startups in this space. Members of the community can join groups, communicate with fellow investors and debate investment strategies, all the while evaluating the sources of the information they receive from others by viewing their portfolio performances.

Fortunately, I had a chance to ask Tony Leach, ZeccoShare’s Product Manager, a few questions. When asked what type of investor is best suited for Zecco, he said, “Zecco is ideal for the self-directed investor – the kind that researches their own decisions and wants to use new tools like the ZeccoShare community to get an edge on the market.” Zecco lies at the intersection of a brokerage and a community of plentiful resources and thus “sets us apart from the competition.”

Part of Zecco’s plan for the future is to integrate with the broader online community and it appears they are heading in that direction. Zecco has implemented Motley Fool’s CAPS stock recommendation system, which produces ratings for stocks based the ratings of investors that take positions in them. Although the CAPS system has been somewhat controversial, it may for the time being give you a little edge to beat the market.

If you didn’t make the cut for Covestor because you aren’t “proven” and you’re looking for a more dynamic community with more resources than Cake, stop by Zecco and open an account (no minimum).

On Friday, Duncan Riley posted about a new service being provided by the receipt tracking website, Shoeboxed. Following shopping at e-commerce sites across the web, you can share with your friends what you have purchased. The service suggests that “if you got it, flaunt it.” Without the social shopping features, Shoebox provides a highly useful tool for tracking all of your purchases and storing images of the receipts as well as each of the items that you have purchased.

As the website states, “At Shoeboxed, we’re making it socially acceptable to strut your stuff. Show off everything you’ve been buying and browse through other people’s stuff. Then let out your inner Mean Girl and go nuts with our stereotyping feature. Using the mouse is almost as easy as real-life stereotyping!” I don’t know about you but I have been dying to let out my inner mean girl. From that statement you can tell what demographic they are targeting.

Personally, I would love to be able to track all my receipts but I’m not sure that I have the time to scan every receipt. Maybe this is a tool that would be more useful for those with personal assistants. Would you use shoeboxed?