Spree.ly (http://Spree.ly), GetVocal.com’s latest self-funded social experiment, has been released in the “Nick” of time to help with your online Christmas social shopping experience. Spree.ly (@spreely) allows you to shop online with your family and friends on virtually any shopping site.
Spree.ly provides a proxy-based, shop-with-a-friend experience with no registration or sign-ins and with built-in live chat. In addition to Amazon, Spree.ly lets you shop with an unlimited number of friends at Nordstrom, Barnes and Noble, Apple, Overstock, Williams-Sonoma, and Frederick’s of Hollywood. Our flexible architecture allows us to approve more stores weekly! In fact if you are brave enough to help beta test new shopping sites, we have included place in the store directory for you to go to any web address that you would like to surf with your friends (Caution: not all shopping sites play nice!)
Built using Ruby on Rails in less than 30 days, Spree.ly is designed from the bottom up to provide online shoppers with the most secure and social shopping experience. At the heart of our application is a custom-built, secure proxy service with real-time, push-based messaging and no database or data store of any kind. The only data persisted is temporary cookies as required by most shopping sites but all of these cookies get eaten by our Cookie Monster every night at midnight.
Like Google Wave, Spree.ly employs a real-time push messaging service for its live chat and webpage URL communication between you and your friends while browsing sites. These messages are pushed out as one-time broadcasts to all browsers shopping under the 5 character session appended to the end of the Spree.ly URL. Once these messages are delivered in real-time, they are gone from their servers. New friends joining the shopping experience will not see previous chat messages or web page URLs visited by you and your friends. You are also notified as new friends join your shopping experience. To learn more about our security considerations, please visit http://spree.ly/browse/security.
You can begin your social shopping experience by directing your browser to http://spree.ly and clicking on the link in the middle of the page with the 5 character suffix. You can update your status messages on Twitter and Facebook or via e-mail to alert your friends of your current shopping spree online. You will be notified instantly as your friends join Spree.ly and immediately be able to chat and share web pages with them in the sidebar on the left of the page.
Our revenue model is based on an affiliate program, revenue sharing model but we hope to bring customers special offers such as additional discounts and free shipping promotions not advertised on these sites.
For more information, you can follow Spree.ly on Twitter at http://twitter.com/spreely or visit http://spree.ly/about or contact chris@getvocal.com.
