While bringing consumers deals from local merchants is the crux of most of these social coupon providers, Wrazz has several unique features that sets it apart from the crowd. It incorporates geo-location features that allows Wrazz users to see where their friends are currently enjoying deals, and has a “Game Plan” feature designed to allow easy coordination for friends to meet up.

Being something of a FourSquare / LivingSocial mashup, Wrazz certainly has an attractive offering. However, competitors LivingSocial claims to have an 85 million users base and Groupon has recently purchased one of its smaller competitors, MyCityDeals. These two sites represent the “big boys” in the social buying arena, and stand to be Wrazz’s chief competition.

Social buying is clearly not going away any time soon. And it’s no wonder: businesses love the publicity and potential swarms of new patrons that these sites promise, while the sites themselves get their cut at the point of sale. Bringing consumers and local businesses together is a natural outgrowth of the surge in popularity that geo-location services have been seeing lately and the steady growth in social networks. People love to socialize, love to shop, and love to save. Wrazz is entering this market with gusto, and its unique position as a smartphone-based app rather than a website shows that it’s positioning itself as a leader in a new niche.

“Why? Because while Yelp has seen tremendous growth in just a few years, we’re still new to a lot of people. Despite our best efforts to educate consumers and the small business community, myths about Yelp have persisted. We’ve said all along we believe these incorrect notions stem from the combination of the filter and this advertising feature — and we’re practicing what we preach. Lifting the veil on our review filter and doing away with ‘Favorite Review’ will make it even clearer that displayed reviews on Yelp are completely independent of advertising — or any sort of manipulation.”

So essentially, Yelp is separating reviews from advertising, which is apparently what caused the confusion amongst small business owners. Fast Company claims that Yelp should have been transparent in the first place.

Do you use Yelp? Do you agree with these changes? How do you think Yelp could help protect business owners from false reviews?

Another interesting finding of the reports was that “blogs are becoming trusted guides, steering users who are seeking very specific information to places of interest online”, according to Rob Crumpler, CEO of BuzzLogic. Unfortunately the study didn’t provide much insight as to what sort of influence peers have on social networks as BuzzLogic doesn’t appear to have much data on that issue.

Honestly, aside from the article title there was little data to backup the claim that blogs are more influential. There was a ton of data suggesting that blogs have substantial influence though. Technology blogs are the most influential for purchase decisions, followed by media and entertainment, games/toys/sporting goods, travel, and automotive.

Apparently ads on blogs were also on par with sponsored search results. If you want to advertise then, feel free to contact us! Seriously though, there is very little data supporting the argument that blogs are more influential than friends for purchase decisions. The one thing that the study suggested was that avid blog readers are more influence by blogs then by friends. I’m not sure that is really all that surprising.

It would be interesting to see data on purchase decisions based on the recommendations of friends within social networks. Do you find blogs or your friends to be more influential? Have you made any purchase decisions based on the recommendations of either?

Kaboodle – a social shopping site where you can discover, recommend and share consumer products you stumbled upon on the web. It features powerful shopping tools and products that lets you organize your shopping lists, discover new things from people with similar tastes, get discounts on various products and ultimately of course, find the best prices. Kaboodle is a social networking site for people who loves to shop. As a member you can create and join groups, share shopping tips, feedback and product suggestions, personalize your profile using the site’s polls and widgets. Kaboodle boasts of 7 million unique monthly visitors to date.

ThisNext - describes itself as a shopcasting which is defined as a way to spread the word about things you love. It’s an amalgamation of the word shopping and broadcasting. But to put it in more simple terms, ThisNext is a social shopping site where you can explore, discover and rave about the hottest products online. It goes by the dictum – “buying better to live better”. As such it offers a platform where you can interact with community-validated taste makers and influencers in discovering recommended products. This next has evolved to become a virtual place where you can find and experience the best, most unique products on the web.

Zebo – is a social shopping community which taps on the power of your friends to help you get cool stuff online. You can create your Zebo personalized profile containing a list of what you own, want and love to shop for. Likewise, you can check on what other people have and want as well. In doing so, you can give them valuable tips and advices, talk online about your shopping needs, discuss products with your friends and ultimately of course – shop. The site also lets you create polls and find out other people’s opinions, create photo albums and share them with your friends.

Stylehive – is a social style club portal for people who live for fashion, design and shopping. It lets you meet your style muses and follow them as they discover and share their latest online product finds. Stylehive can best be described as a hybrid of social networking club and pop-culture lab. It features trendsetters creating, discovering and buying the hottest products online. As a member of the Stylehive you can build tagged collections to share, comment and speak with other hive members, build you own 24/7 shopping magazine, build and share your own shopping “wishlists” for the holidays, weddings and parties, promote yourselves and get noticed the world and join the fun by helping in building the hive with hot bookmars and recruiting people with style.

Wishpot - is a social shopping site that makes it easy to save and share interesting things you find in stores and online. Items in Wishpot are collected online or from stores and organized using an online shopping list. Your shopping list can be kept private or shared with your friends.It also lets you collect and discover products that you like, recommend your favorite stuff, share and explore gift suggestions or ask for opinions and advice. Wishpot works something like this. When you find something that you wish to buy online, you can saved the product information by clicking on a browser button. Wishpot will then save the product name, image, price and where to buy the product automatically. You can also add personal notes and tags to your saved product.

Shop Like Anna is a MySpace or Facebook with fashion sense. It allows teen-age girls age eight to fifteen to talk, shop and “friendwork” with their fellow teens. And yes, the site limits its membership to girls in that age group as well. To ensure that this policy is carried out, Shop Like Anna requires verification from parents or guardians before a user can participate.

Alright, now that you know how safe Shop Like Anna is what else can the site offer? A lot of social networking and social shopping stuff actually. First, members can shop at the site using pre-loaded “Anna Points” doodle on pictures submitted by themselves and friends, read articles relevant to a teen-age girls lives that includes topics on style, entertainment and celebrity.

In addition to all these, Shop Like Anna also features profiles and advice from career women in various fields such as photography, fashion design and many more.

Shop Like Anna is definitely a social shopping haven for teen-age girls who are both into shopping and social networking/web 2.0 stuff.