Shop Your Social Network’s Product Recommendations With Pickie

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Name: Pickie

One-Liner Pitch:  Pickie is a tablet magazine that's created with the personal product recommendations from your social media feeds.

Why It's Taking Off: The Flipboard-like app is one of the easiest ways to browse the most-shared items on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter by category or brand.

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Traditional shopping catalogs mailed to doorsteps are often ignored or quickly skimmed through. When we need a new dress or coffee machine, we rarely turn to catalogs.

Pickie [iTunes link] is a new iPad app that builds a personalized shopping catalog based on a user's Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter feeds. The startup aims to make shopping easy by harnessing a person's online network.

The app's custom-made technology scans your social networks for personal product recommendations to populate the virtual tablet magazine. So, when you need a new computer or pair of dress pants, you can use Pickie to browse by category or brands. Pickie's virtual and flippable pages are constructed with products images that your friends and the experts you're following are bookmarking and sharing.

There are plenty of conversations happening online about products, clothes and accessories, but a meaningful way to comb through social media for product recommendations was missing, said Pickie co-founder Sonia Sahney Nagar.

"If you're looking for a book or a dress, there's no easy way to see what the people who matter to you have recently talked about," Nagar said. "Pickie is based on the very simple idea that social proof matters when you are deciding what you want to buy," Nagar said.

SEE ALSO: 5 Money-Saving Tools, Apps and Websites for Holiday Shopping

After signing into the Pickie app by syncing our Facebook account, we were directed to pick three categories we care about, and chose "Gadgets," "Fashion" and "Pets." In just a few seconds, Pickie created a shopping catalog just for us. In addition to getting to know what you like through your social graph, Pickie asks you to select the most important brands in each category.

In our original Women's Fashion Catalog, there were pictures of the most popular shoes, clothing and accessories from our network on Facebook and Pinterest. Pickie pulled the most shared items from each of our favorite boards onto clickable pages. There were editorial pages created by Pickie editors in our 300-plus catalog.

Pickie is available on Apple iPad and as a desktop app. The app pulls beautiful images of products from the web and displays them in a Flipboard-like format.

In the app's beta phase, the Pickie team found women enjoyed the browsing and magazine-reading experience that the shoppable catalog provides. Male users were most engaged in browsing through the "Gadget" and "Men's Style" categories. But for both groups, social proof drove traffic and sales, Nagar said.

The Pickie team believes it's offering a unique experience in a market saturated with mobile-shopping apps by allowing shoppers to see the products their friends are talking about. For now, the New York City-based team is focused on improving the user-generated iPad magazine and shoppable catalog.

Do you trust the product recommendations by the friends and experts you follow on social media? Tell us in the comments below.

Image courtesy of Flickr, {Charlotte.Morrall}