Webware

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)

The heated mobile-payment wars are expanding...beyond mobile. Zong, one of the start-ups hoping to capture the market for online micropayments billed to a mobile phone, announced Thursday the debut of "Zong Plus," which lets members link credit or debit cards to their Zong accounts.

It's another move that pits Zong against Boku, a competitor that launched right around the same time with broader global reach--last month, it announced its expansion to subscription-based services in addition to on-demand micropayments.

At launch, Zong Plus is compatible with Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express accounts,

"Today you've got a variety of products for different kinds of payments and services," vice president of product management Hill Ferguson told CNET News. "You've got PayPal. You've got several of us in this mobile payment arena. What Zong Plus does is just elevates us into a different mobile payment type."

On the surface, adding traditional credit card payments seems to defeat the purpose of Zong, which inherently tries to offer a simpler and more universal alternative for small payments (cell phone carriers put a cap on how much can be spent). But Ferguson said that Zong Plus, which is free for participating merchants to upgrade to, "is an optional feature for consumers who have payments cards and feel that the incentive that we offer is powerful enough for them to open up their wallet and type in the information."

What's that incentive? Part of Zong Plus is a loyalty program that will rack up points much like airline miles. In a participating game or other micropayments-linked application, this means that when enough points have been accrued, the member may be alerted that their next purchase is "on the house."

Whether it will work is still unclear. Zong has deals with social gaming and virtual-world companies like OMGPOP, IMVU, and Gaia Online, but there are still enough rivals offering similar packages as well as the off chance that a big e-commerce player like PayPal could launch a service of its own and snuff out the competition.

The announcement comes in advance of the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco, where pretty much any start-up involved in the latest generation of e-commerce (read: magic swords and Mafia dons) will be showing off its wares. Plenty of other companies will be making announcements, too, presumably some in the payments space.

The American Association of Retired Persons, or AARP, an organization with the stated mission of helping "people 50 and over improve the quality of their lives as they age," has launched a Web site for whippersnappers, people not old enough to be members, called LifeTuner. The consumer pitch is noble: It helps people set good financial habits early, while there's still time. The site and the advice and tools on it are free. AARP membership, of course, is not free. Hence the obvious business case for the service: It can help people retire so they can afford the dues. Everybody wins.

In a roundabout way, LifeTuner is also a benefit to existing AARP members, as the organization's research shows that 69 percent of them, "provide financial support to their adult-age children." This site could knock that number down a notch, a clear bonus for all involved.

The service itself is made up of a community system (forums, blogs, scheduled chats), expert advice articles and interactive features, various handy calculators, and a Flash-based app, My Financial Tuner, that will tell you how far ahead of, or behind, the curve you are on having the appropriate budget for your particular financial situation.

The My financial Tuner app will tell you how behind the eight ball you are.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The Financial Tuner app reminds me of a feature on Mint, which can check your spending against demographically similar groups. Mint, though, checks your actual spending. The Tuner requires you input your major financial figures -- salaries, mortgage, average utility bills, and so forth. I'd argue that Mint, like other personal finance Web sites, is more useful, since it shows you where your actual expenses are out of whack, at a level granular enough that a simple change will be reflected in your "score" the next month. The Tuner feedback is more at the avuncular level: It will tell you how much you're spending on a category, like mortgage, and compare it to people in your income bracket, your age group, etc. But what are you going to do with that data? Move if the app says you're spending too much?

There's no real social angle on the site other than the forums. No groups you're automatically placed in based on financial situation, no buying clubs. That's too bad, because that is something people could really use, and the AARP could add market power to any financial groups its members belonged to.

There are a lot of community rooms on LifeTuner, but not yet a ton of activity.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

People over 50: If you're looking for a site to recommend to your kids or grandkids that has good financial advice, LifeTuner isn't a bad site at all to point them to. But it is a bit old-school. To really get a bead on finances, people young, old, and middle would be better-served by a more dynamic financial system like Mint, possibly coupled with an up-to-date investing site like KaChing.

The revamped Facebook gift shop.

(Credit: Facebook)

It's not just music as rumored: Facebook announced on Wednesday a major overhaul to its "gift shop" feature, meaning that the social network just became an even bigger player in the burgeoning virtual-goods industry.

"We now are unveiling a newly stocked and redesigned Gift Shop, with new categories of gifts and additional gifts for charity, music, and sports from developers," a post on the company blog by Facebook's Will Chen read. With so many gifts available, we also introduced a new design to make it easier for you to browse and purchase gifts with different gift categories." It'll be rolling out over the next few weeks, he added.

Needless to say, this is a huge deal for the virtual-goods industry, which some estimate is now a billion-dollar business.

It also beefs up one of Facebook's few non-advertising revenue streams (though many of the virtual goods in the "gift shop" are licensed or sponsored)--even though in a talk on Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg downplayed rumors that the company would be making big moves into bringing commerce and payment transactions to its developer platform.

Music files, as rumored, will be sold through a partnership with Lala. Right now, they are only available to Facebook users in the U.S.--less than a quarter of its total membership. For one Facebook "credit" (10 cents U.S., and currently available for purchase in 15 currencies from around the world), members can buy one another songs that can be played online. For 10 credits (a dollar), they can gift downloadable MP3 files. "Other people who are able to see the music gift (in that member's profile) will only be able to play the song in full once, after which they will be able to play a 30-second clip," Chen's post added.

This is a big move on Facebook's part for another reason: iLike, which powers the extremely popular "Music" app on the social network, and which allowed members to gift songs to one another through the third-party application, was acquired by Facebook rival MySpace this summer.

Instead, it's partnered with Lala--which is also one of the partners in the music initiative that Google is slated to launch next week.

But music isn't all that's new in Facebook's revamped Gift Shop. There are also sports gifts officially licensed by teams--branded virtual goods from a number of college sports teams as well as the National Basketball Association and U.S. Major League Soccer. Also rolled in have been the non-profit gifts that Facebook first debuted this summer. In addition to existing partners like Kiva and Project Red, virtual charity gifts will also be sold by popular third-party Facebook app Causes.

And images posted to the Facebook blog show additional categories--e-cards, which are pretty self-explanatory, and "real gifts," which bundle a physical gift sent in the mail along with the virtual gift. These have all been tested in a limited scope by Facebook over the past few months.

Leaked screenshots of a document that Facebook distributed to advertisers earlier this month revealed that an upcoming design modification to Facebook's home page will make birthday alerts--which also encourage members to buy gifts for one another--more prominent.

Facebook hasn't disclosed any financials related to how much advertisers pay for sponsored gifts, or how any revenue-sharing logistics pan out.

Other social-networking services are trying to get in on the action, too. Social-site creator Ning, for one, launched a gifts platform earlier this week.

More to come...last updated at 4:01 p.m. PT.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg speaks with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit about features we can expect from the social-networking site.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Two of the biggest rumors about big, upcoming Facebook products--an ad network and a payment transaction platform--won't be making a big splash anytime soon, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said in a talk on Wednesday afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit.

"We're asked it all the time," Sandberg said on the question of whether Facebook would be launching an ad network for external Web sites using the Facebook Connect universal-login product. "We focus on building products for users and we think about the monetization later. And I'm not saying that in a cute way, because we are very focused on monetization."

Then there are the reports that Facebook will be launching a PayPal-like transaction system or large-scale virtual currency, a rumor that's been floating around literally for years. "There's a lot of speculation on payments, and (we) don't want to fuel the speculation," Sandberg said in her talk on Wednesday. She did say that Facebook processes payments internally for advertisers buying up inventory ("We needed people to be able to buy ads internationally," she explained) and that it's playing around with the "credits" system that it uses in its "gift shop" feature.

"We are doing some testing with a couple of developers to see if they can use credits in apps they have," Sandberg said. "That's all we're talking about right now. We're in a learning phase."

Some potential customers have hinted that Facebook may have already gotten too big to deploy such a product. When asked about the idea of a Facebook payment system, John Cahill, the CEO of teen virtual-world Meez, told CNET News earlier this week that he's skeptical about its potential.

"The bigger the social network, the harder it is for a currency," Cahill said. "I've spent some time in the payments space and the real-world currency space, and rolling out a payment system that can be used by millions of people is very, very difficult. If you get it wrong, you can destroy your community."

But Facebook is dipping one toe after another into the virtual-goods pool. Earlier on Wednesday, the New York Times broke the story that Facebook would be letting members gift songs to one another through a partnership with music service Lala. This would be the first concrete result of yet another longstanding rumor of a "Facebook music service."

Additionally, Facebook has partnered with a number of nonprofits for charity-focused virtual gifts.

Are Web users going to get tired of paying for kitschy virtual items to pimp out each others' profiles? Social-site creator Ning sure doesn't think so. On Tuesday, it announced the debut of its virtual goods platform, so that network owners can offer virtual profile items for sale (much like Facebook does) and pull in half the revenue generated.

"From giving each other bloody chainsaws to shock troop dog tags, our members are having a blast recognizing each other for their contributions to the Lost Zombies Ning Network," said Scot Leach, founder of the "Lost Zombies" network on Ning, in a release provided by the company. "Creating custom gifts around our shared love of everything zombie adds a new level of fun and excitement for our members."

Some analysts have estimated that the virtual goods market will hit $1 billion this year.

Participating networks' members can buy the gifts for one another and they'll be displayed on the recipient's profiles. Payments are processed with PayPal, and then revenues are split 50-50 between Ning and the site owner after PayPal's transaction fees are taken into account. But while Ning site owners can design the gifts themselves, they won't be able to price them--all will cost 75 "credits," or approximately $1.50--something that might not go over so well with site owners who want to sell really expensive bloody chainsaws.

Ning, which says that a total of 1.6 million "networks" have been created with its technology and counts 36 million active users overall, launched a third-party applications platform last month.

The company was co-founded by Netscape creator Marc Andreessen, who justified a $60 million funding round last year by saying that the company was preparing for an economic "nuclear winter." Or maybe a zombie attack.

This post was expanded at 1:07 p.m. PDT.

When I wrote about KaChing last December, the site was a fantasy stock market where you could track the pretend portfolios of other investors. But the game of make-believe is coming to an end at the company, and KaChing is now letting users attach real money to their accounts. In doing so, this company is taking on the $11.5 trillion U.S. mutual fund industry. It looks like a great opportunity, both for the investors in the company and consumer equity investors.

KaChing lets anyone create and manage a portfolio on the site, and any user can see these portfolios and track their returns. Unlike other fantasy stock-trading sites, though, with KaChing you can actually commit money to mirroring another user's portfolio. This feature should be live on the site Monday.

The site offers some protection for users choosing to track others. It awards "genius" badges to portfolio managers to only those players who have been on the site for a year, who have qualified for and signed trading regulatory documents, and whose consistent performance measures over a certain level. Only genius users can be mirrored.

KaChing's "geniuses" might be worth investing real money in.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

KaChing traders also have to specify their fund or portfolio philosophy, which is tracked and rated by the system. If you say you're a health care investor, for example, and then you make a killing on Apple, your return may go up but your "sticks to strategy" rating will decline, and people following you or investing alongside your portfolio will be sent "drift alerts" to tell them that you might have moved from the "good" category into either the "lucky" or "reckless" bins. As CEO Andy Rachleff says, with a typical mutual fund, there's no way to tell if the investors are lucky or good, and especially not in between quarterly statements.

To invest alongside KaChing geniuses, you have to use fund a brokerage account at Interactive Brokers, which KaChing will do for you, online. KaChing works with this particular brokerage since it has an API that lets KaChing make fast trades fairly cheaply, at 2 cents a share.

Geniuses on the site set their own management fee, of which KaChing takes 25 percent. KaChing also will collect margins on stock trade commissions. Investors who are mirroring KaChing geniuses can stop doing so whenever they wish and trade their stocks out thereafter. Unfortunately, you can't yet trade into another genius' fund without setting up a new trading account yourself, but that should be fixed shortly. Account minimums are low, though ($3,000) and there are no exit fees.

Rachleff told me that the real secret behind KaChing is the observation that the Ivy League endowments outperform the S&P due to "a superior strategy to choosing investment managers," which is what KaChing's algorithms check for. Oversimplified, KaChing rates adherence to strategy coupled with returns, not just returns themselves. That makes returns predictable, Rachleff says.

Top KaChing genius Min Thang believes in health-care.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Of more than 8,000 KaChing users with public portfolios, only ten, so far, are geniuses whose accounts can be mirrored. Hopefully that number will rise. These ten people need competition, and users need options.

I'm one of millions of consumers dissatisfied with the returns in my mutual funds as well as the lack of transparency in these investments. I am a big fan of KaChing's model, enough so that I am strongly considering putting some of my own money into the service once there are more genius managers to track.

If you're a frequent Amazon shopper, you might be looking out for tools to help enhance the experience of buying products on the site. There are services on the Web to help you get more out of Amazon than simply picking up a few products from the company's pages.

Let's take a look.

Get your Amazon on

AmaDig If you're looking for a different way to search Amazon, AmaDig will provide it.

When you get to the site, you can pick which Amazon category you want to sift through. From there, the site lists images of different products offered in that category. When you click on a respective product, you can view its specs, pricing, and reviews. You can also view the listing on Amazon or add it to your shopping cart from the site. It's a neat tool, but beware that the interface is a little clunky.

AmaDig has a unique way of displaying items.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Amazon Mobile If you're ready to buy a product at the store, you might want to consider using the Amazon app on your iPhone before you plunk down the cash.

Amazon Mobile not only lets you search for products and pricing, you can also take a picture of a product and have the app search Amazon's database to get its pricing. You can add items to your cart and use Amazon's 1-click payment system to place an order. (Read our full review here).

Amazon Mobile in action.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

Amazon.com on Thursday announced that customers looking to get their packages sooner will have a couple new options available to them.

Amazon customers placing deliveries within the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, Las Vegas, and Seattle, as well as "some surrounding areas," will now be able to receive shipments on the same day they place an order. The service will be coming to Chicago, Indianapolis, and Phoenix "in the coming months."

Amazon said "thousands of items" are available now to customers living in those cities. The new option, called Local Express Delivery, will have varied pricing that depends on the type of product purchased. Amazon Prime members--customers who pay $79 per year to receive unlimited two-day shipping from the online retailer--will need to pay $5.99 per item for the service.

In order to get an item on the same day it's ordered, customers will need to buy products prior to their city's cutoff time. For example, New York customers will need to order a product by 10 a.m. ET, while Seattle customers can purchase products by 1 p.m. PT. The other cities' cutoff times vary within that range. According to Amazon, it will list the cutoff times on each eligible product's detail page.

Amazon's Local Express Delivery charges.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)