What happens when following the fashion herd becomes wisdom of the masses? When everyone can become his or her own fashion editor? When "citizen" journalists replace glossy magazines as oracles of fashion? The next big thing in fashion is not a hot young designer or a new label but an online evolution driven by peer-to-peer recommendation and consumers who want what they see others are buying online - in short, a new kind of conspicuous cyber consumption.

"It's what I call Web 3.0," explains Dawn Bebe, managing director of the UK's first social shopping site for women, Osoyou.com. While the Web 2.0 label is used to refer to the current interactive phase of internet development, defined by blogging, social networking and "wiki" sites built with user-generated content, Bebe believes, "The next evolution for the web is social networks that have a purpose - vertical social networks.... This is where social shopping comes in. The thing that bonds these people is shopping and fashion." "We believe that peer-to-peer recommendation is already essential in e-commerce because shopping is a social and emotionally driven experience," says Malte Goesche, chief executive and co-founder of iliketotallyloveit.com, a social shopping site based in Germany and named after a phrase used by Paris Hilton.