A couple of weeks ago, one of my most recent clients - Kaboodle - soft launched its collaborative shopping and research engine. The service allows users to collect and aggregate information about products, gifts, wishes, travel destinations,… on personal pages that can be shared with family, friends or the public. Under the hood, Kaboodle automatically extracts key pieces of information from a web page selected by the user - including image, title, description, price and stores these nuggets alongside the URL of that web page. It just takes the simple installation of the Kaboodle bookmarklet, and a quick read of the tutorial, to get started.
What I found remarkable in Kaboodle, and got me engaged with the company, is the non-geek focus of the service, which is really targeting the average Internet user who needs support in her/his research of items to shop, plane tickets to buy, etc. Funny enough, my 8 year old complained a week ago that bookmarks of his browser did not allow him to save the description and the picture of the gifts he is considering requesting for Christmas. Bingo! Sort of Web 2.0 for the masses, without tags, RSS feeds and mashups - though all these features are on the short term development roadmap.
Kaboodle is also an implementation of the concept of the “3rd page of search”, as described by Charlene Li - which is basically an aggregation of search results that “make sense” relative to a specific context. That context can be very specific and personal, or be mapped as a generic use case. For example, let’s say that I am researching a bunch of add-ons for my brand new Powerbook G4. I can come up with a page like this one which is useful for me, and then share it with others. This is where tagging, collaborative filtering and making sure that search engines properly crawl these pages will be critical. Net net: the time I have spent in finding the proper accessories can be re-used by others with no additional effort.
Then this week comes the beta release of the Yahoo shoposhere (see TechChrunch's coverage) - as opposed to social shopmarking, a term invented by Brian Benzinger when he wrote his very thorough review of Kaboodle. Concepts are similar except that the shoposhere is based on results of queries hitting the Yahoo Search/Shopping engine and that less information is extracted/saved per “pick”. Whilst it is interesting, that feature does not give access to the best items/prices available on the market, since only Yahoo affiliates are searched, or more broadly to any type of information you may want to aggregate alongside shopping information - like the best online resources for new Macintosh users listed next to items to be shopped.
Kaboodle has released last night a suite of new functionality: a badge allowing bloggers to provide access to their Kaboodle page, new types of pages, and... more servers. Yeah, already. You can see the badge on the right column of my blog, which points to the “Standard” page. 3 new types have been added: Top picks, Wishlists and Giftlists. My “Favorite Books”“ page is a Top picks for example.
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| www.kaboodle.com |
One of the great features of Kaboodle is its ability to collaborate around an object, either by adding items and modifying existing ones (wiki style, but upon invitation) or commenting/voting (blog style). For example, it would be great if you could help me pick up a coffee machine for the office. There are a bunch of these out there, I have ”shortlisted“ a few of them on this page, and your votes would help choosing one.
So go ahead, try Kaboodle, and tell us what you think could be done to improve the service. And don't get me wrong, geeks are welcome as well but they might find more interesting to create a clever combination of tags and a mashup application to replicate the functionality :-).
Additional coverage:
- Reuters: Kaboodle makes sharing Web bookmarks easier
- TechCrunch: Kaboodle Launch: Bookmarking + Wiki
- Om Malik: The whole kit and kaboodle
- Comparison Engines: Kaboodle - An Experiment in Social Shopping and Kaboodle - Social Shopping
- The Guardian Unlimited: Save the pages you see in Kaboodle
- Digital TechLife: Kaboodle - making comparison shopping easy (the most spot on review from a user to date)
To be the "third page of search," I think the Kaboodle URLs need to be more readable?
Posted by: mparaz | November 21, 2005 at 06:46 AM