Gift giving has really gotten a whole lot easier thanks to social media and online shopping. I am continually amazed at how I can just go online and find something that I want to get for someone with such ease. Not only that, but I can get it to them with decently fast shipping for not a whole lot of money.
But, if you are anything like me, you tend to wait till the last minute, and then you are scrambling to get something for someone. In that case, you'll have go to the store and probably pay more than you would have if you'd planned ahead online.
What has been interesting as of late is how social media has played into the purchasing of products. Kickstarter launched — for many of us — the idea of many people contributing to something in order for a product to get funded. The app I have been using the past few days, called Aggregift, takes this model and applies it to gift giving. It is actually a pretty cool idea and one that I think could possibly take off. I know for me, it is a lot more meaningful if a lot of people chipped in and got me one gift that I know I can use, versus getting a handful of gifts that just sit around and collect dust. So let's see how it works in real life.
One of the things that I love about the web is that everything is so instantaneous. It has literally changed the way that we get our news and information. I hardly ever watch the news anymore because I can pull up just about any major news site and get real time stories at my fingertips. There is no need to wait for the nightly newscast any more.
With this, developers have continually tried to come up with ways to develop apps for us to use so that we can get our daily news fix. We first had the RSS reader and now we are starting to move toward what is considered "social news." Twitter, more so than Facebook, has opened this door for news to become more interactive for us, the reader.