Shoe Dish Facebook App Pairs Social Game with Social Commerce [screenshots]

“Think you know your friend’s style?,” asks a new Facebook app developed by department store Neiman Marcus in partnership with social shopping site ThisNext.com. Called Shoe Dish, the app is designed to test women’s knowledge of shoes they think their friends would wear and create a “Shoe Closet” to save their favorites. Oh, and it qualifies as f-commerce because, ultimately, Neiman Marcus wants women to purchase shoes they like from its e-commerce site.

How Shoe Dish Works

A randomly selected friend’s Facebook avatar appears alongside a certain shoe style headlined with the question, “Would friend’s name wear these shoes?” “Yes” or “No” buttons appear beneath the images along with an option to let her know of your choice, which posts a response your friend’s Wall.

If you like the shoe, you can click through to view it in more detail. You also have the option to either buy the shoe, “throw” the shoe at a friend you think would like it (I failed to get this function to work.), or add it to your “closet,” which is a wish list of sorts. Friends can view your closet and vice-versa.

In addition, you can see which shoes are trending, get editor’s picks, view randomly selected shoes, see a leaderboard of active users, and invite friends to play. Because this is a game, you accrue points based on your activity.

Lastly, on the product detail page (thanks to Facebook’s Open Graph) you can share a post to your Wall based on the following options:

• 
I have these shoes!
• 
Dying to own these shoes!
• 
My friend has these shoes… so jealous!
• 
My friend totally needs these shoes!
• 
Obsessed! Best shoe I’ve ever seen!
• 
Yuck!

Sharing is not limited to Facebook either. The product detail page provides options to share via Tumblr and Twitter, as well.

This use of game mechanics is not foreign to Facebook. Social games have been a staple of the network since before Zynga created Farmville. As such, Shoe Dish fits the fun, interactive environment Facebook users are accustomed to.

Whether that approach will translate in to product sales is still open to question. Considering the price of some of the shoes ($795 was a figure of one pair I saw), I’m wondering if Shoe Dish will appeal to all but the more well-heeled user.