Forrester has predicted that the era of social commerce will heat up over the next five years, and NY-based Altrinsic has made a bet on this trend with their recent acquisition of ShopIt.com

Shopit.com is an e-commerce platform that lets buyers and sellers complete simple transactions on social networking sites. Atrinsic claims that the application has been downloaded 800,000 times, and that they will soon allow sellers to import existing listings from eBay & Yahoo stores to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Social commerce has come a long way over the last couple years. Facebook tried to push the movement forward with their Beacon product, but that ended poorly when users were automatically opted into what seemed like a violation of privacy. But the landscape is different today. The “walls” and “activity streams” of social networks are now a major major distribution channel for content & links, and younger users are connecting more and more to one another rather than to institutions. Social-commerce start ups can benefit in a big way from this. But they’ll also need to mitigate a major risk… With advertising revenues dipping, social networks are clamoring for ways to add transactional revenue to their books. The barriers to entry are quite low.

ShopIt.com is based in Los Angeles and received $2.5M in Series B funding from Emerson Ventures and Propulsion Ventures.