“I think today, we’re still in a world where we have brands telling us what we neeed to know about a brand’s individual products,” she said at the Glimpse social discovery conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. “But that’s not always the truth about the product, nor is it what’s interesting to you about that product. So the future will be reversed, where it’s just about the information that’s relevent to you.”

Wanelo is a small but immensely popular social shopping site where users post, like, collect and re-post images of items that are all for sale — the entire value proposition of the site is that you can click through to purchase any of the items. While the site only had 8 million users in May, Varshavskaya said 70 percent of them are coming back to the site every month, and they’re spending an average of 50 minutes a day on Wanelo. And because all of the items posted to Wanelo are selected by its users to be liked and purchased by others, it creates an interesting discovery engine for goods.

As I’ve written before, it’s actually quite a challenge to define what social shopping is. Does it mean tweeting out your purchase after you buy something? Does it mean adding Facebook Connect on a brand’s site to see which of your friends like it too? Does it mean browsing items on Pinterest posted by your friends, or reading reviews from strangers on a site? Or texting photos of a dress to your friends when you’re in a brick and mortar store?

The definition changes depending who you talk to and what kind of shopping experience you’re talking about. (And can be hard for big brands like Zappos to harness, when often people just want fast shipping and a wealth of products.)

“No one really wants to follow other Zappos users,” said Will Young, director of Zappos Labs.

AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, who is an investor in Wanelo and also spoke at Glimpse, pointed out that social validation around products comes in two broad categories: the power of the crowd to surface the best products (think Amazon reviews or topics upvoted on Reddit), versus the power of your friends to influence your tastes and opinions (think Facebook or Twitter friends).

“If I’m buying a stereo or digital camera, I don’t really care what my friends thought. What the qualitified group thinks is good enough,” he said. “But if I’m buying a piece of clothing, sometihng with taste, maybe I do care. The term social almost changes in meaning depending on the situation.”

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A few months ago I heard about Wanelo and downloaded the app to give it a spin. At its simplest, Wanelo is exactly like Pinterest — except you can click through to purchase anything posted to the site. But when I first installed the app, I was greeted with photos of cut-off shorts, backless dresses, cat pictures, sparkly nail polish, and the like. It was like a 13-year old girl’s heaven. But it wasn’t exactly my style. I couldn’t figure out how to make the main feed reflect my tastes, and I quickly lost interest.

On Tuesday, the company is altering its formula to help people get into Wanelo more quickly, changing the signup process to show people how to follow brands and people (which I struggled with on the old version), and then showing users their curated feeds as the default page of the app rather than what’s trending generally on Wanelo.

Wanelo was founded in 2010 by CEO Deena Varshavskaya but has exploded in popularity in recent months primarily among teenaged and early-20′s women. The company has grown from 1 million registered users in November to 8 million in May, which wouldn’t necessarily mean much, but the company reports that users spend an average of 50 minutes a day on Wanelo. Even among a small group of users, that’s a lot of time, when you consider people spend about 30 minutes a day on Facebook. And a Twitter search for the word “Wanelo” is essentially a feed of (primarily women) discussing their Wanelo addictions.

Varshavskaya said women in the primary age group for Wanelo were becoming obsessed with the app, and as soon as they opened it, they felt at home among the products shown on the trending page. But for anyone else who doesn’t dig sparkles, it was harder to show them the appeal of Wanelo.

“For them, the feed is an amazing, addictive experience,” Varshavskaya said. “For them it’s an awesome first experience. But the downside is that the trending feed cannot by definition work for everyone.”

It seems the re-design fixes the initial signup challenges, but the obvious question is still how Wanelo can distinguish itself from Pinterest, which has raised a lot of money at this point and is pretty much the default social network for saving images and products on the web right now.

Varshavskaya and Wanelo’s investors, which include prominent names like Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures and Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, are quick to explain their confidence in the company. Wanelo is fundamentally oriented toward commerce and transactions rather than aspirational photos like Pinterest or Tumblr, Varshavskaya said. And it’s true that if you’re looking to purchase an attractive item and want inspiration, Amazon might not be your best bet, and it’s frustrating when you click a link on Pinterest and discover that it’s broken.

So what’s the future for Wanelo? The company seems ripe for acquisition, either by Pinterest itself or another shopping site like Amazon looking to get into social shopping. Pinterest will surely add a commerce component soon, and while it will be a challenge for Pinterest to transition from a site full of photos to a site with shoppable links, it’s surely a challenge the company will try to solve.

And as much as I got into the new Wanelo app, I still found myself saving aspirational items like an $1,800 necklace. Which feels pretty much how people use Pinterest.

If you’re interested in design and the future of web brands, make sure to check out our RoadMap Conference in November in San Francisco (be the first to access tickets here when they go on sale this Summer).

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Fancy has had no shortage of big-name backers, including Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and French luxury conglomerate PPR. And, if American Express is on board, it would be mean even more momentum for the social shopping and discovery site. Michael Silverman, COO of Thing Daemon, the company behind Fancy, declined to comment, saying CEO and founder Joe Einhorn was in an evacuation zone because of Hurricane Sandy.

Fancy launched in February, giving people the ability to “fancy” items that they like, similar to the way people pin products on Pinterest. But Fancy’s special sauce is its trove of product data, which it matches to fancied items. Fancy then lets users buy many of the products directly through its website.

The site has been rumored to be a possible acquisition target for Apple. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg also became a user in June. But with the new funding, it looks like Fancy is set on staying independent at least for the near future. The company raised $10 million last year and previously raised $6 million in 2010.

Here’s a video we did with Einhorn when Fancy launched in February:

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Starting today, Fancy users can sign up to purchase a $30 monthly box curated by the site’s two million members. When they order the box, members can indicate their favorite categories and Fancy populates the box with some of the most popular items in those categories.

A picture of a sample box shows what appears to be lower-priced, knick-knack type items (such as a watch band, T-shirt and a pack of gum), but the New York startup says each box exceeds $60 in retail value.

With all the possible kinds of subscription boxes out there – from cosmetics to eco-friendly products to food for all kinds of diets, you’d think consumers wouldn’t be looking for another box of the month. But Fancy COO Michael Silverman said in an e-mail, “this was a feature our users were asking for and we decided to act on it as the holiday season approaches.”

To Fancy’s credit, the company has been especially active creating new ways for consumers to actually purchase the products they curate in a Pinterest-style way on the site. Last week, it launched a new group gifting option and earlier this summer it rolled out a program to compensate users for their actions.

A monthly Fancy box is an interesting idea, but I’m curious to see if the company can fill it with items that people actually want. Several of the most visible popular items on Fancy cost in the hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. And, personally, I’m not sure I’d be into some of the cheaper items (like graphite skulls and a vampire fangs ice tray). But the company is clearly busy cooking up ways to turn curation into commerce and the new box is yet more evidence of that.

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In a blog post today, the e-commerce giant announced that it has acquired the six-person startup, which curates products from across the Web.

With the acquisition, eBay said it will get the talent to improve its online shopping platform, particularly in personalizing experiences and merchandizing options.

eBay also said that the purchase dovetails with its $80 million November acquisition of Hunch, the recommendation engine launched by investor and entrepreneur Chris Dixon.

Building off the recent acquisition of Hunch, eBay is establishing a sustainable presence in New York City, with a state-of-the-art technology development center. New York employees will work on highly visible technology projects across eBay, including data analysis, personalization and other specialty areas.

Co-founded by Zach Klein, also a co-founder of Vimeo, Ben Pieratt and Eric Jacobson, Svpply has raised $550,000 from investors including Spark Capital, Founder Collective, Ron Conway, Dennis Crowley and Jason Hirschhorn.

The sale to eBay keeps it in the family to a certain extent, given that Dixon, who will be heading the new eBay headquarters, is a Founder Collective partner.

Similar to other social shopping sites like Fancy, Lyst, Uncovet and others, Svpply helps people discover products by using social connections on Facebook and Twitter. According to the startup’s website, it brings in 3,000 new products daily from across the web and represents more than 70,000 stores and brands.

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The service, which went into alpha last September, had been building for a while around a simple-yet-complex idea: talking with your friends while you all watch a premium video online. Then along came Google+, with its hangouts. And then came Airtime, with its idea of videochats around shared experiences.

Suddenly things looked a little trickier. Ahmed’s response?

Change direction and raise $500,000 from a syndicate of private investors to keep pushing the service into a new shape. The new, reinvigorated Lutebox — which goes into open beta on Wednesday — is no longer organizing itself around video, but instead wants to tap into another buzzy trend: social shopping.

“What we realized,” Ahmed told me, “Was that we didn’t have incredibly valuable content, and that we couldn’t afford to get it. We’re not Netflix, who can afford to pay millions to Warner Bros or Fox to get the latest movies.”

Instead he took cues from Pinterest and Fancy, developing a platform where you can talk to your friends about things you want to buy. You can see where he’s coming from: shopping in real-life is often a social experience, where you show your friends what you’re interested in and make collective decisions. What if that could apply online too?

To be honest, though, this is not actually as radical a change for Lutebox as it may seem: the core of the product is still a videochat service, where you can talk to up to six friends simultaneously about what’s on the page in front of you. The difference is what the subject of your chat can be. Now the site has added a shopping mall, where you can search for items from a range of different retailers (all U.K.-based at the moment) and discuss them with friends.

That means it’s got a better commercial model (Lutebox doesn’t have the same up-front costs as it did for video, and earns affiliate fees on every purchase made through its service) but it still faces some substantial obstacles.

The first is a broad one: is videochat really what people want to do? So many people have thrown themselves onto this bonfire, and yet — unsurprisingly — they’ve nearly all ended up being burned. While they may prove useful from time to time, videochats remain a niche pursuit. And videochats about specific topics narrow the field even more. Even Airtime, which had been hyped thanks to the involvement of Facebook investor Sean Parker and Napster creator Shawn Fanning, met with a muted response.

And then there’s the platform problem.

Lutebox is not a plugin that allows you to launch a chat on, say, an Amazon page. No, it requires you (and your friends) to be signed in to its service, and looking through its own catalog of stores. That means it has to become a destination, something which will require some serious and work to reduce the friction. The search needs a lot of work, the discovery requires some deep thinking, and the inventory needs to be carefully managed.

And if wants to follow in the footsteps of Pinterest and the like, I suspect that is going to need to appeal deeply to a specific user base, which means it is going to have to narrow itself even further to get more items in from specific, more popular stores. For example, I can see it having some use for fashion retail, but probably not for purchasing electrical equipment. Right now it’s a grab bag of items from across the board.

Still, it’s only just gone into beta — so there is clearly time and now money to work on improvements. If the site can overcome the natural inertia of videochat — perhaps by allowing people to talk not just with their friends, but also trusted guides (why not launch a chat with a fashion stylist, say, for advice on the dress you’re looking at?) it may be able to carve out a corner of the market.

And if it can partner with a retailer to produce a white label service, that may have some value too. (Ahmed says it’s a possibility, but he is not talking to retailers about it yet).

So, plenty of challenges. But I’ll give them time to take a breath: right now they’re still reeling from the decision to shift from video to shopping.

“The stress around the decision to pivot, it’s tough because you’ve invested so much time and energy and belief into something,” Ahmed told me. “We had 250 testers in alpha, who were using it a lot — but it was a realization, more than anything, that it wasn’t useful for users. It all boils down to that.”

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Rob Kramer, the company’s co-founder and CEO, put it this way: “If Craigslist and Pinterest had a baby – that’s HipSwap.”

Since the site’s launch in March, he said, it’s expanded to cities nationwide, amassed more than $21 million worth of merchandise and attracts about one million monthly unique visitors. He declined to provide user numbers but said the user population is in the six figures and grows 2 to 3 percent a day. The site has also raised about $1.1 million in seed funding from Greycroft Partners, Founders Fund and others.

After bad experiences on eBay and Craigslist, Kramer said he and his co-founder Andrew Skinner created the site to give people an easy, enjoyable way to sell goods online. Items can be new or old, from people’s homes or local vintage and secondhand shops, but he said the goal is a marketplace for “unique inventory at the neighborhood level.” It gives the hipster in Brooklyn a way to buy things from people her area, as well as Chicago, Los Angeles and neighborhoods across the country.

HipSwap overlaps with Etsy in that both marketplaces allow people to sell vintage goods, but Kramer said some Etsy sellers are finding they can sell certain things on HipSwap that they can’t sell on Etsy because HipSwap doesn’t focus on handmade items.

“We want to own the virtual supply chain for the secondary market of goods,” he said.

Sellers can take pictures of their stuff with HipSwap’s iPhone or Android app and then upload them to the website, where they can price, title and post their listings in their own online shop for free. Buyers can receive the items via meetups, shipping or delivery (but only if they live in Los Angeles in New York).

The site released several new features today, including:

• Gilt Groupe-like flash sales that last for 72 hours and offer products in a dedicated category, such as art or fashion.

• The ability to personalize user experiences by giving them the option to “Hip or Skip” items. It’s like Pandora’s thumbs up or down feature and lets the site create a customized marketplace that reflects their preferences.

• The option to tweet their collections, poll Facebook friends for opinions or pin collections on Pinterest.

• An easy way to donate to charity. Every Saturday, HipSwap says it will pick up unwanted goods from users and deliver them to Goodwill for free.

• A quick way to cross-post on Craigslist. With one click, HipSwap sellers can post their items on Craigslist to share their more visual listings (and give HipSwap a bit of promotion).

As someone who loves to find great stuff locally and secondhand (I confess that I’ve even restored a coffee table found on my street), I appreciate the HipSwap idea. And I’m all for a Craigstlist-like marketplace that’s more visual and easier to use. But it will be interesting to see what happens to the site as it grows. Craigslist and eBay struggled to preserve their cultures when they got bigger. As Etsy scales, that’s an issue it’s grappling with as well.

I also wonder about what happens to the quality of goods as more people join. HipSwap bills itself as a way to discover “what’s inside the most fabulous closets, homes and shops in your neighborhood.” But that means a lot of secondhand items, not all of which may look as good in real life as they do online. The social, curation and personalization tools give sellers incentives to present goods that will help them build an audience on the site. And Kramer said sellers need to post the condition of the items. But, for buyers, it’s still hard to gauge the true condition of something from a picture and written report. To prevent the sale of fake goods, Kramer said they’ll be adding a verification process for brand-name items in the next couple of months.

The site doesn’t just want to be known for ease of use or beautiful design, he said, “One of our main goals is to be the most credible marketplace.”

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Wednesday morning, the eye-candy-meets-commerce website released Fab 3.0, a collection of more than 100 updates intended to make it easier for users to socialize and discover content on the site. It includes one sad piece of news for Google: the replacement of a Google+ sharing button with one for Pinterest.

Fab said Pinterest was already contributing two percent of its daily visits without a dedicated sharing button. Google+, on the other hand? It wasn’t even driving more traffic than CEO Jason Goldberg’s personal blog, the company said. When Fab integrated with Facebook, its referral rate rose from 15 to 20 percent to 30 percent per day, Goldberg said. The new Pinterest investment will likely boost referrals by a significant amount as well.

Since launching last June, the site has grown to four million members and now displays 10,000 products on the site daily, up from 2,000 at the end of 2011. But as it scales further, Goldberg said, they want customers to continue to feel the thrill of discovery and not as though they’re on any other e-commerce site.

“The challenge for us is… how do we design the site so that it keeps the fun factor while making it bigger,” he said.

Fab’s Live Feed, which gives users a dynamic visual view of what members are buying, favoriting and sharing, has generated tangible results – 15 percent of all visits to the Live Feed end in a purchase, the company said. But Fab today said it was stepping up its social game to let members filter their feed so that they only see their Facebook friends’ activity. Fab 3.0 also lets members filter the Live Feed by product category and trending items and it allows them to buy directly from the Live Feed. Pinned items also get routed into the Live Feed. The new social enhancements go live today on Fab.com in the U.S., but expand to mobile apps in a couple of weeks and across Europe later this year.

Interestingly, Goldberg said that while a greater percentage of the site’s users are female (60 percent), male users tend to purchase more often. Women like to browse, but men are more direct and want to buy, he said.

The design-centered site also tinkered with the design of its navigation, adding a new Featured Today tab with the day’s hottest items, a new subnavigation and a cleaner layout. It also tacked on a new section, called the Smile Pages, which feature daily items that the company said make members – what else? – smile.

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While Pinterest has taught people to pin the stuff they like from the web, Glimpse takes the existing data from Facebook’s open graph and marries it with its database of 500 million products and 500,000 stores. TheFind’s CEO Siva Kumar told me TheFind has been working with Facebook for some time to bridge the two data sets, mapping a user’s likes to products, their taxonomy and a user’s profile. Now, when a Glimpse user likes a page, the service can determine what product the URL is referring to, can pull up the most recent availability and pricing data and also fit it into different styles and trends.

Leveraging the like

This was no easy task, said Kumar, but the result is an immediate Pinterest rival that is already informed by a user’s Facebook activity. Users don’t have to follow anyone or like anything further to immediately get a flow of products that are tailored to their tastes. The site presents products from the brands they’ve already liked, the products that their friends are liking now and also mixes in products that fit their style or are currently hot.

Facebook users are currently liking 2.7 billions things a day and the average user has about seven shopping likes. If they want to add to their experience, Glimpse users can just use the Facebook like button on many retailers sites to bookmark their favorites on their Glimpse page. They can also organize their page by creating separate catalogs, similar to Pinterest boards.

For brands, this is a way to get more out of their investment in social integration, Kumar said. He said there are about 100 million products that are currently tracked with like buttons with about 70 percent of top commerce sites using likes. He said now all that like data has a better shot at leading to a sale. Glimpse only presents products that can be purchased.

Search is a task, discovery is fun

The company — which got started in 2005 and has $27 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures – has built a huge database of products by trawling the web, gathering up all kinds of data on every item it can find. It also gets information direct from partner retailers. While that has helped build a successful shopping search engine, Kumar says the momentum is now behind finding products through social discovery.

“Search is a task whereas discovering things you like is fun, and Glimpse is all about shopping just for fun,” Kumar said. “What makes Glimpse a potential game-changer is that it steers the retail industry away from the diminishing returns of search and price comparison and toward growth opportunities merchandizing soft goods in a way that leverages their existing investment in Facebook’s platform.”

The service will start as a Facebook app but iOS and Android apps should be available in the coming weeks. TheFind is trying to show Pinterest how it can be better turn social discovery into social commerce. It reminds me of Fancy, another social discovery site that is marrying user interest to a big database of product information. The race is on to figure out how to really make social discovery lucrative. Pinterest was trying to use affiliate links for a time to make money but it still hasn’t sorted out a bigger plan to generate revenue from its users.

I think Glimpse has got a lot of smart back-end work in place though it remains to be seen if people will gravitate toward it as people have with Pinterest. Pinterest has taken off, in part, because it’s not just about discovering products but about expressing yourself through curation. People don’t necessarily think of the Facebook like button in the same way, as a tool for curating their favorite stuff. But I think Glimpse is still a good effort to make the most of all that Facebook like data and potentially make some serious money from it.

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But Gerten believes there is a future in using Facebook as a sales channel, though it means rethinking the role Facebook plays in it. On Tuesday, his company unveiled a new social commerce platform called 8thBridge Graphite that doesn’t rely on steering shoppers to Facebook stores. Instead, it integrates with existing e-commerce sites and uses Facebook as a place to communicate consumer interest in products, letting them shop and gain information before buying on a traditional retail site.

Gimme some Love

With Graphite, retailers can use Facebook’s Custom Open Graph to place unique buttons on their site that allow consumers to express their interest in products. So instead of a generic “like” button, retailers can include customized buttons for things like: Want, Love, Own, LOL, Gimme, Neeed, Ask a Friend or I Can’t Wait to Wear. When a user presses on a button, that interest gets placed into their timeline along with a “shoppable story,” which is like a widget that lets other friends get more information and zoom in on the product without having to leave the Timeline. If a user wants to buy the product, they are taken out to the seller’s existing e-commerce site, where the transaction is completed.

Facebook commerce hasn’t taken off because very few people know about stores on Facebook, Gerten said. For retailers, Facebook is another place that needs to be maintained but is not optimized for sales like their online store.

Perhaps more troubling, people don’t seem to want to buy things on Facebook yet. Minneapolis-based 8thBridge found that 82 percent of respondents in a survey of 2,500 people said they are not comfortable sharing their credit-card information on Facebook.

But Gerten believes that Facebook is still very valuable because it’s the place where people share their interest level in products and other things. By building and shaping commerce around people, retailers can still find a lot of value in Facebook as more of a shopping tool and less of a retail destination.

Use Facebook for shopping, not transacting

“I think the value of social media in general is word of mouth; it’s so easy to talk about your brand and Graphite is making it even easier,” Gerten said. “What really needs to happen is it has to move away from a (Facebook store) solution to an integrated thing with existing channels.”

Brands such as American Apparel, Hallmark, Elle, Oscar De la Renta are on board with Graphite and will start including customized buttons on their product pages. Gerten said retailers should see a clear lift because their customized buttons are more expressive, prompt more sharing and can be tested to get the best response. And he said friends on Facebook who see a shoppable story are 18 times more likely to interact with the story when they can view it inside Facebook instead getting redirected to a website via a link.

I think this evolution in Facebook commerce makes sense. There may come a time when people want to buy through Facebook stores but right now, the best use of Facebook seems to be in encouraging sharing and shopping. It’s really still early days in social commerce, but companies are starting to find smarter ways to use social media; not just to generate awareness and buzz, but also revenue.

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