This summer while booking my trip to Europe I noticed something I hadn’t seen before across a number of hotel aggregator sites: the use of real-time notifications to ‘let you know’ who is also looking at the same hotel and when the last room booked was.

I’m not exactly what I think about this tactic as a consumer, but I’m sure it’s effective for sellers.

Having the constant pop-ups is a similar feeling to being in a bricks and mortar store where you’re ‘considering buying a shirt,’ but have put it back on the rack. Someone else walks up and starts looking at the same shirt! It’s both a validation (that you had a good eye) and a major source of pressure —  now that other person might now take the shirt and leave you high and dry!

Anyway it’s interesting to see the web evolve, especially e-commerce as it tries to replicate more tactics from the offline world. These real time notifications strike me as a really different approach and one that is likely to spread to other verticals outside of hotels very soon.

To see for yourself, surf around on Booking.com and click through several hotels where they are showing limited inventory.

Image above is for a London hotel via Booking.com.

WHAT PERCENTAGE OF SEARCH QUERIES ARE…

All information compiled/taken from Quora answers

I never break news anymore. It’s near impossible these days to beat any of the mainstream tech blogs to the punch. However…

It *appears* that the super stealth startup Pumpkinhead has now launched as About.me. Looks pretty neat.

The founders of About.me include Tim Young (CEO of Socialcast) and Tony Conrad (Partner at True Ventures).

Original TechCrunch Coverage here.

Congrats guys!

**Update: Let the record show I was correct and three days in front of TechCrunch! :=) Also, cool story about the codename, “Pumpkinhead” on Quora:

I wanted to share a quick hack I’m using this weekend.

My sister is in the process of moving from New York to Baltimore to start business school. I suggested that we get some movers to help us on each side of the trip, figuring we’d pay $40 an hour and provide some food and plenty of water. I used Craigslist to post a basic advertisement about 48 hours beforehand.

In the past I have used Craigslist to find handymen for a number of jobs such as moving furniture and brush. The response rate has always been high, but filtering to find the best/most trustworthy of the bunch is always a challenge.

However, this morning it occurred to me to run Rapportive and see if I could find Facebook or Linkedin profiles of some of the applicants (Rapportive is an awesome app for Gmail that surfaces that shows the social profiles for various email addresses). Sure enough, we had a total of about 40 responses and about 10 showed up in Rapportive. After scanning their profiles to eliminate anyone who looked like a serial killer I picked a jazz musician in New York (listened to his stuff on MySpace) and a student in Baltimore.

Filtering against public social network profiles is definitely not the be all end all, but it’s definitely better than nothing and provides me with a little bit more comfort when hiring strangers.

Several years ago I worked on a project backed by a now prolific angel investor on the west coast. I found the idea extremely compelling, but the for a couple reasons the project failed to reach the next step. The most major reason was that our users were not totally comfortable with the new type of social interaction our model was predicated on: staying at someone else’s house (and thereby undermining the $120M+ lodging market). Fast forward a few years and it’s really exciting to see the concept validated by Airbnb.com (backed by Sequoia and gaining real momentum): the two concepts are almost identical. The difference is that Airbnb.com seems to be emerging just as people are becoming more comfortable opening up their lives – offline, as well as online*.

People tend to forget that it’s not only technology that evolves, but also users and their willingness to embrace new mediums at scale. Social dynamics often lag the models themselves (think Mercata). I recall a time not long ago when my parents would balk at the idea of paying for something online. Now they wouldn’t think twice about it. Times change. People change. Even announcing my location on Foursquare was not something I thought I’d be comfortable with. Now I am.

I have a feeling that our large friend counts on Facebook and willingness to publicly share our locations via Foursquare are also opening us up to new opportunities – and perhaps a new willingness – to connect offline.

I see a wave of offline engagement taking shape and it will be big; big because there is a void in many young people’s lives that screens alone cannot fill**. People are social creatures and they want connect with each other; if they can do so while also generating passive income and saving money, so much the better. I think Burning Man is a testament to this movement.

Offline + Marketplaces for Reallocating Resources

Aside from Airbnb.com’s “progressive” social dynamics, it also boasts an incredibly empowering marketplace model. Empowering in the sense that its community both saves and earns money via the reallocation of resources. Reallocating resources on a local marketplace level is a huge deal. Craigslist does it. eBay does it. New entrants such as Etsy, Homeaway, Kickstarter, and Meetup are the new offspring. But Airbnb.com takes it to an entirely new level. It takes a B2C model and reinvents it as C2C, similar to what Napster did with music.

Look for more of these types of platforms to emerge.

And Back to Offline…

As a final note, I currently have several friends looking for work. As they would attest, while Linkedin is great, sending an “in-message” is not the same as meeting someone in-person at a networking event. We would all do well to remember it.

*The poor economy probably helps, as does an ability to leverage the social graph to filter out those who might be perceived as overly creepy

**Perhaps Soctt Heiferman is right in taking a sledgehammer to his iPhone

Groupon.com now sports a lofty $1.5B valuation.

Techcrunch had a great analysis of Groupon last week, dissecting the site’s revenues, traffic and potential.

While there are several juicy nuggets in the post, what jumps out to me the most is:

“Groupon gets more of its traffic from Facebook than any other site, including Google”

Note that in the image above, Facebook referrals to Groupon blow everything else out of the water. Makes it difficult to be a naysayer about Facebook’s ability to drive commerce.

An obvious pattern that is emerging on the social web is the rise of the public social gesture.

For a bit of explanation, the social gesture is really “social sharing” in the context of a brand, business or person. It began with the comment, and then moved to the status update and the shared link. Public social gestures now encompass an increasingly wide range of thingys from the check-in (Foursquare), to the purchase (Blippy), to the Like (Facebook).

While the lowest common denominator of gesture has traditionally involved a hyperlink somewhere in the mix, Facebook has made a bold move to challenge this as I outlined the other day.

Paul Buchheit of Facebook had some really interesting insights into the rise of these gestures at today’s Web 2.0 Expo. I paraphrase below a few sentences worth pondering

Paul Buchheit: “[Facebook’s] real power is in the people. [Facebook is] an amazing product because it has all the users”

Sarah Milstein: How about privacy on Facebook?

PB: I changed my privacy settings to be more public. I like the idea to share things easily — except my phone number and email. This again goes back to FriendFeed. It’s about serendipity. but it’s hard to predict what those things will be. Things tend towards being better the more we share.

SM: So after Gmail and FriendFeed – what’s coming next on the web do you think?

PB: …quick and lightweight. That’s the future of a lot of what’s upcoming in the communication mediums. Making it easier to do lightweight conversations.

… It’s not too shallow. It creates the context for conversations later on.

A week ago I was in San Francisco for F8 and I’m glad I was.

Several months earlier I wrote about the impending “Facebook gold rush” and I believe it’s beginning to materialize. Facebook is a true force and I don’t think people realize the magnitude of what they have been accomplishing.

The move to create a universal Like button is fascinating because it highlights a key distinction between Facebook and Google strategies: the hyperlink vs. the Like. My guess is that when Facebook borrowed the Like concept from Friendfeed they never expected the volume of Liking that materialized. Likes are in many ways a lower friction form of link sharing. Thus as websites begin to implement Likes (50,000 have already), Facebook begins to challenge Google on many levels. The foundation of Google Search is page rank, and thus hyperlinks. By pushing web visitors away from sharing links in favor of clicking “Like”, Facebook begins to challenge Google in a way that may not be immediately obvious, but is most definitely ambitious and possibly game changing.

More:

• CopyBlogger on How Facebook is Killing SEO
• Wired on the Great Wall of Facebook

Cool news that Salesforce.com is acquiring Jigsaw.com for $142M.

I got to know the Jigsaw Team while at Workstreamer and I am really excited for those guys and for Austin Ventures who no doubt did well in the transaction.

Kind of funny that just a few years back TechCrunch penned an article called: Jigsaw is a really, really BAD idea :)

I’m at F8 and was pumped to hear the announcement for like buttons extending outside of Facebook and the Open Graph initiative. As Zuckerberg said, the “default is now social.”

One thing to note is that Facebook’s default like-button code won’t work on WordPress as it does not account for dynaimcally generated pages (e.g. a blog). However, I found a version that works.

Download the Like Button plugin here.

Update: if you are wondering about whether like buttons will replace the older “share buttons”, the answer is YES