In 2005 you had, perhaps, three news sites you followed, and it was manageable to visit them all. But as self publishing exploded, those sites suddenly expanded to include friends' Livejournals and blogs, funny tumblrs, and more. There was RSS, but that was for nerds and all this content just wasn't manageable anymore.

Enter twitter. Staying atop media was now as easy as a "follow". In addition, you could use your own friends as a filter. It changed news discovery forever and tailored content to each user. How does this apply to ecommerce? Much like self publishing, the explosion of easy e-commerce software, from Shopify to Etsy, has given us far more options than are manageable. Now, we are waiting for the solution - the equivalent to Twitter - that will let us search across all these stores, discover new ones and leverage our friends. This session explores the emerging solutions, what this means to retailers, and how they can end up a Buzzfeed and not a New York Times.