Glimpse, a new Facebook app from shopping search engine TheFind, combines comprehensive e-commerce data with Facebook’s Open Graph to provide a personalized pallet of trending fashion and design items based on what people (including you) have Liked.
Products appear based on the tastes and preferences of the individual and their Facebook friends. They can be sorted by popularity within and across the most popular brands, stores, and styles. Think of it as a retail store window decorated with the products you want curated by the people who know your tastes.
According to TheFind CEO Siva Kumar, Glimpse is designed to make shopping fun. “Search is a task, whereas discovering things you like is fun, and Glimpse is all about shopping just for fun,” said Kumar.
Kumar indicated that more than 100 million products online have Like buttons, with the heaviest concentration of Liked items in fashion and design products. “The data now exists to instantly personalize an interesting shopping experience for trending soft goods and present them in a format that is both truly social and entertaining,” he added.
What makes Glimpse unique is that it is built on top of TheFind’s shopping index of more than 500,000 stores and 500 million products, gleaned through a combination of web crawling and merchant data feeds. When combined with the data set from Facebook’s Open Graph, the result is an experience that lets shoppers browse the most Liked and trending items by style, brand, or retailer.
When you see something interesting on Glimpse and click on the image to see more details, that action is saved to your Facebook Timeline as a “Glimpse.” For instance, your Timeline may note that you Glimpsed a Michael Kors “Carla” Sandal. You can opt to hide your Glimpses from view by clicking the settings gear icon in the upper right corner of every page and turning “Timeline” off, however.
Glimpse is a free app available through invitation only – at least for the present. It will also soon be available as a free tablet and smartphone app using Facebook Connect.
