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What normally happens with something like Cnet or any official reviews is that an editor or one reviewer writes their opinon and you choose to either agree or disagree with it. These sites or publications thus decide what products they want to talk about based on what they believe their readership may want.
Social shopping is instead about the users themselves choosing and deciding on the content and products they want. Not only that, but by recommending and commenting on products - a buzz is generated around items of interest which in turn propogate to the top of any rankings. Seen as the "wisdom of crowds" whereby a large number of diverse people will make better decisions than one or two individuals.
Amazon has product reviews but there is no way to know if one product is better than another at any point. If three products all got a 4 or five star rating - how would you know which one to choose?
Combine this with being able to share your recommendations with friends and you can then even jsut pick products from a group of individuals whose opinion you trust. As an example, I have a couple of friends who know a lot about HD LCD TV's and I want to see which ones they would recommend for me to buy as our interests are very similar.
There's even more to it but I'm concious of how long this post is getting :-)