I've written about various breeds of social shopping in the past, so I decided to give some thought into a categorization with examples. Below I've listed the different types of social shopping I've observed and some companies that support them.

Comments and Ratings -- Commenting on products has been around almost as long as e-commerce. Two popular players in this space are BazaarVoice and PowerReviews. Most shoppers prefer relying on peer reviews rather than retailer descriptions, so the influence over sales is very strong.

f-commerce -- A new term that was sure to rear its ugly head when retailers started allowing shopping on Facebook, And its all Elastic Path and Alvenda's fault!

Co-shopping -- Retailers like Wet Seal are enabling multiple people to shop together online. This is particularly applicable to fashion, where the real-time exchange of opinions is important. I actually tried this with a co-worker and its pretty cool.

Bragging -- Blippy is Twitter for shoppers, allowing purchases to be "tweeted" so you can keep up with your friends. I get alerted when friends download music or apps from iTunes because chances are I'll be interested as well. This covert influence is one-up'ed by Snatter, a service that gives people discounts for tweeting or posting promotions from retailers. This is the petri dish of viral marketing.

Advice -- Combine the bragging of Blippy and the opinions from BazaarVoice and you'd get ShopSocially, a social network dedicated to spreading product knowledge amongst informed shoppers.

I'm sure if I gave it more thought, a few more types would come to mind, but I've got to get back to work. Now is not the time to be blogging at Oracle!