This morning I was greeted with an email from the Google Alert I set up from the Realtime application (see previous post). Apparently my name was now associated with a new website, Shopalize. I was curious since I don't have an ecommerce site myself and I haven't given any product reviews recently so I clicked the link.
Shopalize is a (new?) website that tracks my twitter feed for anything I've posted related to shopping. Under my feed: an article I retweeted about a flower shop that was penalized for buying links, a testimonial for verizon wireless, and a quote about buying good luggage.
How are they deciding which posts are related to my actual views about products? As you can tell from posts chosen from my tweet stream, only one was a true shopping recommendation, the other two had nothing to do with my preferences.
On the other side, this could be a very useful tool for further promotion of products & services. Companies that regularly post featured items, daily deals etc. could potentially find extra attention via Shopalize. Although searching for my twitter clients who do post deals resulted in a quaint "our service is broken" message with advice to "check back in a few days."
At any rate, this could be something to watch for in the future if Shopalize really gets off the ground. By the way, Shopalize has an alexa ranking of 204,359 so it's definitely popular.
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