Webware

With just two weeks to go before Black Friday, online-coupon site FatWallet announced on Friday that it has launched a Black Friday page where Web users can track all the latest deals for the big shopping day.

Currently, the site lists all the latest Black Friday ads that have surfaced, as well as news and rumors surrounding the day. It also has information on Cyber Monday, the Web's big shopping day, which falls on the Monday after Black Friday.

Of course, FatWallet isn't alone in this space. Several companies, including BlackFriday.Info and DealTaker to name a few, are displaying Black Friday deals. Each site lists many of the same ads. A few of the resources provide updated news. FatWallet happens to be one of them.

If you're interested in finding Black Friday deals, check out our recent roundup of online resources that prepare you for Black Friday.

Although Cyber Monday--a big online-shopping day on the Monday following Thanksgiving--has caused some of Black Friday's appeal to slip, it's still a big day for deal-seekers.

But with the shopping day three weeks away, I'm sure you're wondering why I'm talking about it already. Well, the ads are already starting to emerge. And it's time to start figuring out where you want go and what you want to get. Use these resources to help you do just that.

Track Black Friday

Black Friday Ads Black Friday Ads features all the latest updates on Black Friday deals. The site also features buying guides and shopping lists for those who want a little more than deal-seeking.

So far, Black Friday Ads doesn't have many ads to look at. That said, you can check out details on becoming a Best Buy VIP or see what kind of deals Sears plans to offer on Black Friday. Where Black Friday Ads shines is with all the extras. You can discuss hot deals with others in its message boards, find discounts the site might have missed, and more. Keep this site on your radar when you get ready to buy on Black Friday.

Black Friday Ads updates you on all the latest ads.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Black Friday Black Friday features one of the most user-friendly designs of any site in this roundup. It makes it quick and easy to find what you're looking for.

Black Friday lists all the best deals from several well-known retailers. Simply click on one of the stores' names in the right sidebar and you can see its respective Black Friday ad. When you find an ad you want to search though, I think you'll like what you find. The site lists all the deals by department. Simply scroll to the category you're looking for to find the deals you care about. Next to those items, you'll see a "plus" icon. When you click that, you can add it to your shopping list on the site. I found that it's a great way to keep track of items. I really liked Black Friday. Try it out.

Add the product you want to your shopping list.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

A screenshot of the new Ask Deals feature, which will provide links to coupons atop search results for certain queries that have shopping in mind.

(Credit: Ask)

Ask isn't giving up on efforts to expand its niche in the search market, this time hoping that coupon clippers will make it their search destination of choice.

Ask Deals is expected to launch Tuesday, blending links to coupons from a plethora of online coupon aggregation sites alongside search results for certain types of queries, such as "cheap jeans" or "plasma TV deals," said Scott Garell, president of Ask Networks. There will also be a link to a Deals page off the Ask.com home page, which will have a "deal of the day" type promotion as well as links to other opportunities for savings.

The company had noticed that searches for coupons on Ask increased 50 percent in 2008 compared to 2007, likely a result of the state of the economy, Garell said. But it thought it could do a better job organizing and presenting those coupons than the dozens of coupon sites have done to this point, with the added benefit of having additional information about the product come up within search results.

Ask's index is drawing from about 40 coupon sites, crawling some sites and partnering with others to bring the coupons to the service. It is also overseeing the coupon aggregation with a team of employees tasked with sorting out coupon quality.

It's safe to say that even with signs of an economic recovery surfacing, as long as the unemployment rate remains high there will be a fair amount of people interested in scoring a deal. It's less clear whether that will motivate those people to give Ask a try as their primary shopping search engine.

Despite a very public ad campaign with Nascar this year, Ask lags Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft by a wide margin according to ComScore's latest figures on the search market. And its share has actually dropped since last year, from 4.5 percent of the search market in July 2008 to 3.9 percent in August 2009.

Sony Music Entertainment's catalog is coming to indie music retail site Amie Street, in the New York-based start-up's first major label deal.

But here's the catch: Sony's catalog will not be participating in the "dynamic pricing" model that's been Amie Street's trademark--unpopular songs are the cheapest, and the price rises as a song is downloaded more. Instead, Sony songs will be available for a flat 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29 based on popularity.

"It wasn't a hard decision for us," Amie Street co-founder Josh Boltuch told CNET News. "This isn't affecting all the other dynamically priced music on the site." He noted that RED, the indie music distribution company owned by Sony, already offers its songs on Amie Street through the dynamic-pricing model. "Sony Music obviously has the option to experiment with dynamic pricing at their discretion," Boltuch added. "Clearly we would love to do that with them."

This isn't the first time that an indie music retailer has had to compromise to ink a major-label deal. Sony was also the first major label to bring its catalog--well, its "classic" back catalog--to subscription site eMusic. But the deal resulted in eMusic raising some of its prices in tandem.

Amie Street, which pitches itself as a way to discover as well as purchase new music, made major headlines last year when it was the only place on the Web to buy songs recorded by Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the call-girl-slash-aspiring-pop-star at the center of the Eliot Spitzer scandal.

Buzzworthy social music service Project Playlist has signed another major-label deal: EMI Music has licensed its catalog to the company, which hired former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta as its CEO in November and says that over 52 million playlists have been created to date by its over 42 million registered users.

The first major-label deal for Project Playlist was with Sony BMG, an agreement announced in December. The company had previously been sued by a number of big players in the music industry, including EMI, because of the amount of unauthorized content uploaded to its servers. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) also threw its hat in the lawsuit ring, and social networks MySpace and Facebook banned Project Playlist's embeddable widgets.

Music industry sources say that the RIAA's suit on behalf of the major labels was not dropped and that the industry group is still overseeing the case even though Sony BMG and EMI are not part of it.

"It is crucial for us to continue connecting our users with more of their favorite music," Van Natta said in a release. "This partnership will provide us with a wide-ranging selection of content to satisfy our users' appetites to share and purchase music. We are excited to now have both EMI and Sony BMG music catalogs available and we hope to continue to expand and enhance our service."

There are plenty of competitors for Project Playlist in the social music space: other big players are MySpace's own MySpace Music, which reportedly had sought Van Natta to spearhead the project; Last.fm (owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive); and Imeem, which was rumored to be in talks with Project Playlist for a possible merger. We haven't heard much about that recently.

This post was updated at 10:28 a.m. PT with information about the RIAA's suit against Project Playlist.

In the U.S., tax season is well upon us. And with the recession in full tilt, you may be--smartly--biding your time to make a purchase. Fear not though, there are tools aplenty to help you keep an eye on the price of something, and swoop in to get it when it goes on sale or the manufacturer offers a rebate.

We've put together a list of 22 different tools that let you do this with relative ease. Most only work on Amazon.com, but a few will keep an eye on the entirety of the Web to let you know about sales, price drops, and increases.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Amazon Price Watch (aka NukePrice.com)
Amazon Price Watch may sound like it's only Amazon.com prices, but it actually works with around 100 online retailers. You can have it watch the price of something by dropping its link into the service's Web form, or by installing a browser add-on that lets you start tracking from the retailer's site. Along with price-watching tools, it's also got a deals finder and a "filler items" tool that will help you find low-priced items to add to your Amazon order to get free shipping.

Apnoti
Apnoti watches Amazon for price drops. You can use it either by dropping in the Amazon product link and your e-mail address or installing a tool bar that adds the option to watch a price to Amazon.com. One of Apnoti's strengths is that it refreshes its price index "continuously" so you can be notified when a price drops usually within the hour.

BeatThat!
BeatThat is primarily a deals site that lets users add deals they've found in return for cash. However, each product on the site can be watched to see if it drops below whatever price threshold you set. Like PriceGrabber you must be a registered user of the site to make use of this feature.

Buy it Later
Buy it Later is a tool that's been designed specifically for Amazon.com. You install a small browser add-on, which will add a new button to Amazon product pages that lets you opt-in to buy it at a later date. Once you click this the tool will start tracking the price. It also gives you the heads up when an item comes back in stock, which can be useful if you're looking to buy something with a low supply.

CamelCamelCamel
While camel imagery does not bring price watching to mind, the site does a great job at it. You can search items on Amazon and a few other retailers. It's also got a great grid of products that have had the biggest price drops by day and week both in dollar amount and in percentage. One of the most important things the site does, however, is show you a price history from the past month both from Amazon and third-party retailers. This is a good way to see whether a price is trending up or down, although admittedly its charts can be thrown off by gray market listings.

If you're a regular reader you know I'm a sucker for deals sites. Enterprising iPhone developer Joseph Kiok is too--enough of one to write an app called FreshDeals that keeps tabs on 15 different deals sites to help you find and track the latest bargains.

While something like this would have probably been a better idea pre-economic downturn, one thing it excels at is weeding out the old deals from the new. The sites are refreshed every couple of minutes, and in turn each deal is given a time stamp and a rating from "fresh" to "freshest." The newer a deal the better a chance you have at nabbing it before it expires or the retailer runs out of stock.

There's currently no way to bookmark deals you like, or search any of these sites based on product or keyword, however you can send any item you're interested in as an e-mail--either to yourself, or someone who you think would find it useful. There's also an integrated browser, so you can look at the details of each deal without leaving the app.

In future versions of the app I'd love to see a search tool and, when Apple pulls the trigger on the notifications service, a way to get notifications when a keyword or product you bookmarked goes on sale. You can do this with a customized Google alert and some special e-mail handling rules, but it would be great to get it in a package like this.

FreshDeals is 99 cents and can be found in the app store (iTunes link)

FreshDeals lets you see the latest deals on more than a dozen popular deal-finding sites.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Google is once again running its back-to-school savings promotion that gives anyone a $5 to $10 discount on purchases made at one of the partnered stores using its Checkout service. Online shoppers must spend a certain amount at each store to get the discount, although unlike some previous promotions the discounts are not limited per user or per retailer, meaning you can come back multiple times to get the discount as long as you're hitting the minimum.

The much more interesting story is how well Microsoft's Live Search cash back program seems to have been going since its launch just a few months ago. Its varying percentage has kept online shoppers glued to Microsoft's tracking site. Meanwhile, deal hunting sites like Fatwallet and Slickdeals have had forum threads with post counts in the high hundreds detailing successes and failures using Microsoft's system at various retailers.

What's surprising is how much overlap there is between some of these stores that are vying for the attention. For instance, buying something on Drugstore.com using Google Checkout will only get you $5 back from Google, while Microsoft is currently taking 20 percent off your entire order--a number that could change rapidly depending on the retailer's agreement with Microsoft. In either case, the winners are the savvy consumers who have managed to work the system to get big discounts while the two companies scramble to get the most attention.