Facebook Plans to Create Social Shopping Platform

EBay is integrating Facebook's new Open Graph 2.0 functionality into its global commerce systems, which come under the umbrella of a new business unit called X.commerce, which includes eBay, PayPal, and Magento. The partnership was announced at Innovate, eBay's developer conference in San Francisco.

Recent changes to Facebook's platform mean that users don't have to "like" a song to listen to music or share it with friends anymore. The same will be true for products, Katie Mitic, Facebook's director of platform and mobile marketing, said during her keynote presentation before an audience of 3,000 this morning.

For the first time, eBay's developer community will be able to build social commerce applications on Facebook that allow users to go beyond merely "liking" products. For instance, users will soon be able to "buy," "own," "want," "recommend" or "review" products and share them with friends and family, Mitic explained.