The advantages of shopping at a Black Friday post Thanksgiving Day sale are many, including, but not limited to aggressive mobs, low low prices, lines backed up to Borneo, and mail-in-rebate receipts the size of Warren Buffet’s tax return. One advantage I didn’t mention is that with all the people crammed into whatever megastore it may be, you may get to ask a few of them if the product you’re about to purchase at a low low price minus rebate (if you ever figure out how to get the rebate) is any good. The reason you can do this is that the people around you exist in real physical form, and if you speak the same language as they do, communication is possible, if not even likely.

Back when online shopping began and Amazon.com stock was going up like, 36 points in a day in the late 90’s, they weren’t even thinking of social shopping. But now they are, thanks to sites like FriendShopper. The idea is, you don’t want to be alone anymore in cyberspace, looking for designer salt-and-pepper shakers that hug each other, (salt in pepper, pepper in salt) without anyone else to talk to and ask, in their opinion, are the salt shakers a good idea to get for your girlfriend of 4 weeks and 3 hours who collects designer salt-and-pepper shakers? Granted, you can find the hugging shakers, but if there’s nobody home, or you’re at work and you’re not supposed to be shopping online, you’re just gonna have to click the button without asking anyone but your gut, give up the credit card numbers, and purchase the thing without talking to any other impartial disinterested third party.

This could be dangerous. You just don’t know if the shakers are coated with radioactive lead, in which case you shouldn’t be using them. 1-5 star feedback scales aren’t going to tell you this. People, on the other hand, might.

FriendShopper is a real time social shopping application. To use the facebook analogy, you’re online with a bunch of people, and they become your shopping buddies before you do the one-click and buy the shakers. No, they are NOT a specific shopping site, like Tribesmart is. Rather, using FriendShopper, users can shop at any store across the web and communicate about those products effectively and easily.

(We’ve been seeing this trend lately, namely of alts not launching their own database, but building upon the web at large manifest as browser tools. This is interesting and important. Remember it. Tell your children. Pass the torch.)

In order to shop online with friends, you’ll need to be able to share any product from any online store with your friends. To do that the first step is to add the Bookmarklet.

The Bookmarklet is a button that sits in your browser. Adding it to the browser requires clicking the add button and then dragging and dropping it into your bookmarks toolbar. As soon as you sign up, the people at FriendShopper detect which browser you are using and show you exactly how to add the bookmarklet to your browser.

Go to any store online and simply click the bookmarklet and it will bookmark that product into your “My Items” page within FriendShopper.com. You can then share the items you’ve bookmarked with any of your friends by clicking the “add to chat” button. This will add the item to the conversation.

When your friends share items with you, you’re notified in the chat area and a thumbnail image appears. You can then click it to see the full item details at the original store.

When they make a comment about an item, you’ll know what they’re talking about! Let’s give’em somethin’ to talk about…how about love?

Nah, rather talk about shopping.