ThisWorld by ThisNext: Shopping Activity Map Powered by Google Maps

ThisNext, a social shopping network, recently announced the release of their new shopping activity map powered by Google Maps, called ThisWorld. The Google Maps mashup is designed to show shoppers who’s looking at what Online worldwide, in real time, and hot items people are shopping for in the world.

ThisWorld Activity Map by ThisNext

I had a chance to play around with the new ThisWorld activity map for awhile last night and let me tell you, it is a really cool shopping tool.

As soon as you get to the map, it shows you what products someone just discovered and where in the world they are located. You can click on the map hover and it takes you into ThisNext so you can discover the same products as others from ThisWorld. For instance, I saw that “A visitor in San Lorenzo viewed a Development Leather Jacket 3 min ago.” Roughly every 3 or 4 seconds a different discovery across the world rotates through countries, states/provinces and cities in real time.

Along the bottom of the screen they display random products that have also been recently discovered by shoppers somewhere in the world. The only annoyance is that the map loads really slowly half of the time, so it’s not exactly fast to use, but it certainly makes impulse shopping visually appealing and fun.

The new shopping activity map is a great addition to the social shopping tools that ThisNext offers their users. I have been a fan of their Shopcasting widgets since the day they launched. They also run a social shopping blog.

On a side note, if anyone from ThisNext happens to read this, maybe you can clear something up for me about your blog url structuring?

I see you link to your blog from ThisNext.com and the url points to sub-domain http://blog.thisnext.com/. Once you land on the blog itself, there is another link, on the top left sidebar, where the url points to http://blog.thisnext.com/blog/. In addition, all the blog posts use the second /blog/ directory within the urls too. Why would you use a sub-domain and a sub-directory and name them the same? If it were me, and you wanted to keep a blog sub-directory, I would have named it something like /articles/, /guides/, /shopping/, anything other than the same as your sub-domain. Better yet, you could have just used one or the other (either a sub-domain and no sub-directory or vice versa). So, if anyone from ThisNext could clarify the blog url thing, that would be much appreciated, just wondering your thought process behind that structure.

ThisNext is Featured as one of the social shopping networks on our Product Listing Guide!