The holiday season is upon us and it is time to get your holiday wish list in order. In my family if I do not produce and circulate a wish list I could end up getting some random gifts for the holidays. While all gifts are appreciated, sometimes the best ones are those that you wished for. What's the best way to collect, organize and share your holiday wish list? There are a number of Web 2.0 sites that are devoted to creating shopping or holiday wish lists and I will showcase eleven of them in this article.
BoxedUp, a London startup formerly Gifttagging, offers the ability to easily create personalized wish-lists for
products, pull in Amazon wish-lists and bookmark products while surfing
the Web via a nifty Firefox extension. BoxedUp also offers social features which make it easy to share your gift wishes and maintain a running tally on the things you already have thus completing the gifting life cycle.
GiftBox, a product created by Epigroove, offers an entire gifting dashboard that helps to manage the entire gift giving and receiving lifecycle. GiftBox goes beyond just creating a single gift wish list that can be emailed to one more people. GiftBox enables a user to keep track of all the gifts you are giving, gifts you received and even the thank you cards you send for those gifts. GiftBox also helps you keep track of gift ideas. Check out the GiftBox video demo for more details.
GiftGivr.com offers a simple gift wish list creator. Your wish list can include a title, link and notes about a particular item. You can share your wish list via email and include a custom note. Check out the GiftGivr.com video demo for more details.
GiftHat.com offers another fun way to share your gift wish lists. Users can create and share gift wish lists and broadcast via a widget. Users can create a wish list from scratch or pull in an Amazon Wish List.
ListIdeas offers a social wish list site with shopping recommendations based on the the various wish lists generated by the community. This wish list creator enables users to install a bookmarklet which makes it easier to add items to a wish list when you encounter it online. With ListIdea you can create image rich wish lists as it allows users to pull in images from product pages that are encountered via the bookmarklet.
MetaWishlist is a social wish listing community which also leverages the use of a bookmarklet for easy item additions. MetaWishlist offers a few more organizational features as it offers tags which make it easier to browse for items. MetaWishlist also offers up some Christmas gift ideas from the community.
MyPickList is a social list community which enables users to share and recommend items. Users can create a personalized Pick List which can be shared via email, published on a blog or web site, or shared with other
MyPickList.com users. Users can earn a commission from everyone who buys something from their Pick
List.
OmniWishList is a simple public wish list product. It offers an easy way to enter items to display a title, link and notes. Lists can be shared and users search for specific wish lists by name or email address on the site.
Wishlistr offers a simple and easy to use interface to edit, delete and sort a
list of items without ever reloading the page. Wish lists created with Wishlistr offer RSS feeds so that a list can be subscribed to by family and friends. I really like the Wishlistr user interface design.
Wishpot, a Seattle-based startup, is
a free feature-rich social shopping service that makes it easy to save and share
interesting things you find in stores and online. Items are easily
collected online or from stores and organized using simple online
lists. Lists and items can be kept private or shared publicly. You
can collect and discover products you like as you search for other gift ideas. Wishpot also has a mobile component which makes it easy to add items to your wish list via text message while on the go.
WishRadar is not really a wish list product but it does leverage a wish list to try and help you save money on the things you have identified. WishRadar delivers alerts when it finds the price you have communicated you want to pay for a specific item on Amazon and Half.com.
With the holiday season upon us, I would check out one of these wish list products and get your list together pronto. You could use the more traditional Amazon Wish List which is
even offered as a widget these days but then you might be limiting
yourself to only items found on Amazon. I am probably going to use Wishlistr or BoxedUp for simple wish list creation and monitoring and GiftBox or Wishpot for a more robust set of gift related functions.
Photo Attribution: Gifts photo taken by Terry Johnston
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Tracked on Dec 19, 2007 11:57:18 AM
Great list of gifting sites we can all use. Thanks for sharing this list.
Posted by: Who Am I? | Thursday, November 29, 2007 at 10:38 AM
Hi Frank
Chris from boxedup here. Thanks for the mention!
Just to let you know that we do the gift giving life-cycle thing too, so if you're friends with somebody you can reserve something on their list, and then once it's been given you just click a link to confirm that (in a tab that pulls together all the things that you've reserved for all your friends).
The list owner also has the option to hide the fact that something on their list has been reserved from themself (to maintain some surprise!) - if they do that then any visitors to their list can obviously still see what is and isn't reserved.
And you can also use boxedup to create lists of things that you want to get for other people (if they haven't created their own list). If anybody does this they just need to make sure that that list is marked private to avoid any suprises being ruined!
We're making good progress generally since launch as we build out what is essentially a new type of utility and social interaction platform on the web relating to the products and things that people want, like and have. It's definitely a busy end to the year, what with the holidays coming up, but 2008 is going to be the big one for us as we build the platform out and grow the user-base.
Thanks again for the mention!
Chris
Posted by: Chris | Thursday, November 29, 2007 at 11:30 AM
Hi Frank,
this is Max from Wishpot. Thank you for the mention and for highlighting our mobile functionalities.
I wanted to quickly highlight a few key functionalities that we recently added:
- Wishpot provides a full solution for gift management. We have introduced a "Gift Ideas" list which allows our users to track gifts ideas for others. You can share such list with other friends or family, so you make their life easier as well.
- If someone does not have a wishlist users can find the perfect gift ideas using our "Most Wanted" functionalities. It's very unique as it allows to filter most wanted items by age, gender, category and price. It's super cool.
- With all the "Facebook ruined Xmas" noise going around. We wanted to re-assure our users that we have a very nice way to keep gifts as a surprise! So if you buy something for a friend they will not know about it until you actually give it to them!
There is a very cool release coming in a couple of weeks!
Posted by: Max | Thursday, November 29, 2007 at 03:36 PM
Very cool overview. One other option I'd like to throw out there is my own site: http://wishlisting.com/
We're just starting out so we haven't made the rounds in a lot of circles yet, but our users have really taken to it and the word is starting to spread.
Thanks! (and sorry for the cheap plug!)
Posted by: Tom Lianza | Tuesday, December 04, 2007 at 02:17 PM
YouCouldGetMe.com is another site that is worth considering.
Posted by: Ambercat | Sunday, January 27, 2008 at 02:50 PM