1. WAPtags is a mobile search and bookmarking site that is building an ad-hoc community around search results. Users can leave comments on sites, creating conversations and connections between visitors who found the site through WAPtags.

2. Twitter is built to let you take an online community – your friends, blog readers, or site visitors – and make a mobile community around them. Users can send SMS updates to Twitter which are saved online and can be posted to website or sent to friends’ phones.

3. TextMarks allows people to create instantaneous mobile communities based solely on text messages. Anyone can define a key word and choose an automated response when that keyword is sent to the system. But a community is created when users allow people to subscribe to the key word, then any subscriber to send messages to the group allowing anyone with a keyword, whether they know each other or not, to join in.

It strikes me that potential in mobile communities for retailers is huge and it’s worth watching this area as it continues to grow.

But what was even more striking about the report was MySpace.com’s impact on upstream visits to shopping sites:

Social networking site MySpace.com accounted for 2.53 percent of all U.S. upstream visits to Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending August 26, 2006, up from 1.28 percent six months ago (week ending February 25, 2006).

Compare Myspace.com’s upstream visits (2.53%) to the big three search engines, Google (14.93%), Yahoo! Search (4.69%), and MSN Search (2.33%) and it’s obvious that online communities have the potential to be just as important to retailers as search technologies in driving traffic.

It’s all about a community and what experiences its members have to share with each other. Bazaarvoice is taking advantage of this philosophy by launching yet another another service, SyndicateVoice™, which will share customer ratings and reviews across many of the shopping portals and comparison sites, where most people start their shopping experiences.

SyndicateVoice is seamlessly integrated with Bazaarvoice’s ratings and reviews platform to allow retailers to maximize marketing impact and conversion rates. Bazaarvoice provides the industry’s most advanced analytics to allow companies to pinpoint product trends, community sentiment, and key influencers based on review activity. The Bazaarvoice solution is totally customizable and integrates with leading eCommerce tools including web analytics, site search, and email marketing services.

Bazaarvoice manages a customer ratings and review service which allows businesses to enable and analyze customer ratings and reviews on their website.

“The administrator username and password is given for every system and each system is deleted and re-installed every two hours. This allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here without fear of breaking anything.”

It’s great idea which lets you explore whether a system has the functionality or ease-of-use that you want. The best part is even though it’s a test drive, there’s no sales person trying to pressure you into a new CMS that day.

Overstock stores about 350,000 customer reviews on its product pages, but the retailer needed a speedier and more efficient way to post reviews and analyze the results. The new technology will enable Overstock to more efficiently monitor its customer reviews and rankings using a hosted application. Customers now can review and see their comments posted on both products and specific product characteristics. The technology also helps Overstock produce and measure more precise customer ratings and optimize customer comments for search engine rankings.