MyListo offers social shopping application on Facebook

MyListo, a company offering a Facebook application that provides product reviews from your friends, has finished raising a $250,000 grant from the Facebook Fund.

The Sunnyvale, Calif. company is part of Facebook’s effort to direct money to applications that are more useful than the trivial, time-wasting games that have dominated the application selection so far. Also, while traditional retailers such as Amazon have created Facebook applications, they haven’t really done that well — in part because they weren’t designed ground-up to exploit the social component of the Facebook experience.

If your friend on Facebook buys a PC, they can share their experience about it on MyListo. That way, if you decide to ever buy a PC, you can go to MyListo to find advice, and your friend’s review comes up. You can also see reviews from people who are friends of your friends, and reviews from people who are not your friends. MyListo also helps you learn whether someone has a special expertise in the area. You can also do things like provide a list of what you want to buy, so others can see, and offer advice.

This is early days for the company. The product looks good and clean. However, the challenge is whether MyListo can provide enough value to draw users from other services, such as review sites like CNET or Amazon. Also, many people simply can’t be bothered with writing a review — however brief — about the products they’re buying. So MyListo will have to seed the site with reviews somehow. MyListo launched its own beta Web site in April, and draws about 2,000 daily users. The company launched its Facebook application in June, and has nearly 24,000 installs.

Already, several sites exist to make social recommendations in specific retail areas, such as Books iRead, which has about 40,000 daily users, My Camera Gear, and even BrewSocial, for beer recommendations. But no general retail review application has emerged as a leader.

MyListo is run by Albert Hsu, Tiancheng “T” Zhu and Richard Shin. Hsu and Zhu worked earlier for online retail site Zazzle.

We mentioned earlier that MyListo was a recipient of money from the Facebook Fund. The grant (not equity) was just finalized.

Grants by the Facebook Fund are decided by a committee that includes Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, along with Facebook board members Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Peter Thiel of The Founders Fund.

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