We’ve had a very positive response from our History of F-Commerce Infographic published last week and a number of you have asked if we could re-package it as a Slideshare presentation. Here it is in PowerPoint format.

Brands have been hawking product on their Facebook fan pages for no more than two years now and yet the promise of F-commerce has the retail world buzzing. One prediction says social commerce will top $30 billion globally by 2015 with Facebook-generated sales one of the primary drivers. Certainly brands like Gap, Delta Air Lines and 1-800-Flowers.com have seen some returns on their early investments in setting up a shop window on the world’s busiest social network.

…it goes to the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings, the Motor City’s perennial ice hockey power who tried to whip up a bit of fan excitement in early April for their eventual failed Stanley Cup run this year with a car give-away. What’s not to like there?

Here’s a little charticle that might surprise you. We took the latest comScore web usage numbers, sifting through it to focus solely on Europe’s most popular social sites. The big winner hails from Mother Russia, not Palo Alto.

There is plenty of promise and reason for pause when it comes to social commerce, predicted to be the fastest-growing segment of online retail. But the rush to throw up a storefront on Facebook or Twitter is not for the ill-prepared, as Richard Downs of Infosys Europe tells us.

The ROI debate still hangs over every social media budgeting discussion, it seems, but the camp of believers is growing larger and more impressive every day. One such believer is Unilever’s Selina Sykes, who handles digital and social media marketing for Lynx, the UK’s top-selling deodorant brand for men.

There’s a lot of fuss around the promise of social commerce, and, in particular, F-commerce. But brands are only just beginning to see the potential of using the world’s most popular social network to sell product.

Our SEO expert Andrew Shotland spends a lot of time pondering the algorithmic guts of Google Maps. Could it be all that user-generated data it’s incorporating into Maps is making locations actually harder to see? Let’s find out.

Remember all those predictions last decade that we’d be able to use our mobile phone to buy petrol or cab fare, or pizza? Alas, those soothesayers forgot to mention it would be a feature of everyday life in Scandinavia or South Korea, but for the rest of us – too bad. Well, we’re getting a bit closer to this day now that PizzaExpress has teamed with PayPal UK on a new iPhone app that allows you to go one better: you can pay your bill and book a table at a nearby location.

We’ve just put the wrap on Social Media Influence 2011, our annual conference in which we bring together the top brands, thinkers and practitioners in the world of social business to discuss the big issues impacting the market today and what to expect tomorrow. The event drew speakers from Google, Dell, Unilever, LivingSocial, Orange, O2, Infosys, Viadeo and many more. Here’s some of the highlights and the first batch of photos too.