A long, long time ago, before social media took over the planet, people would make call after call during the holiday season. Stressing, wondering, and stressing some more. Now, with the power of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, holiday shoppers can skip the phone calls and look online to find out what their friends and family want. Many people are posting holiday wish lists to their profiles and those that dont probably have posted some sort of information that will give you a pretty good idea of what they want or are interested in.

But saving a few phone calls is just the tip of the iceberg in how social media is effecting the way people do their holiday shopping. People are looking to social media

profiles of their favorite brands and stores for deals, special discounts, and coupons. Often times these stores will post deals exclusive to their friends, fans, and followers of their social media profiles.

According to data published by eMarketer 17% of Americans plan to use social media in some way this holiday season. 60% of those people said they would use it to find deals and coupons, 53% to research gift ideas, and 52% to check on gift wish lists.

craigslist can be used to feed your RSS reader

The Novermber issue of Wired magazine has a handy  little article (”Pwn Craigslist”, page 34) that explains how simply searching Craigslist could leave you less than satisfied. “Every craigslist query is XML-enabled, which means it can power an RSS feed…if you enter search parameters for, say, a beige 1982 Camaro…the resulting web address will be the same every time”. With this new information, you can add the URL to your Google Reader or any other RSS reader and all new posts that match your query will appear. Ta-da!

So, what do you think? Is this helpful information? I’ll give it a shot.