Thursday, November 24, 2005

D.I.Y. Search II

As predicted in the first D.I.Y. Search posting the new services keep coming in this area, the latest being Yahoo! Shoposphere. This service focuses on Yahoo! Shopping content only but how does it compare to Kaboodle.com, wists.com, Clipmarks.com etc. ?

Setup: No need for the addition to the links or the installation of a new toolbar. A positive but that is because they only offer the service over their own content which is a major drawback in the medium and long term.

Clipmarks is the 'heaviest' toolbar to install with Kaboodle and wist using the familiar del.icio.us link URL option.

Collecting content: Shoposphere provide a + to lists at each product. Yahoo! Automatically captures all product data.

The other service provide much more choice here with Clipmarks boarder highlighting being a nice feature.

Adding your comments and ratings: All services provide the ability to add comments and most allow the addition of a star rating. Kaboodle make this easy to do in my opinion.

Comparison Shopping: Shoposphere impresses here with the selection and visualization of products and prices. The list of retailer links in order of price being another convenient feature.

The other service lack substance but I expect to see a lot of innovation in this area.

Social Community and sharing: Shoposphere does not do a great job here. Yahoo! are trying to link into their existing community/people profile/personal home pages but for those of us that choose to host our webpages else where this is a pain.

RSS and feeds: Keep tracking of your list or list from the community with a simple click to your MyYahoo! account. Again, it would be good to see a one click button posting to independent services.

Wists.com community is particularly well presented with the 'show tags' feature bringing big value to shoppers searching niche products.

In the next posting on D.I.Y. search, what can we expect to see from these services and other startups in the near future?

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