In the past few months I have seen a lot of posts about Kaboodle. While I have haven’t really spent enough time fooling with it, reading about it has given me some ideas…

Specifically, the post I read that finally got me to write this entry was Sean’s entry over at OrganizedShopping.com: “But the thing that gets my about all of these pick lists — Amazon, Shoposphere, Kaboodle — is, what next? How can these lists work together to be more than the sum of their parts? In other words, a good list can be very useful, but, as far as I can tell, there has not been a lot of emphasis on value-mining the relationships between these lists.”

Well since some of the lists can be accessed via Amazon ECS (web services), other sites should incorporate importing your Amazon lists. Like all social networking, it is rather silly that all these different networks are forming. The true power of a social network will not be realized until they can easily communicate with each other, or merge as one. While I see the need for having different services with different offerings, the underlying problem is that the user is still pushing in repetitive information over and over. Since there will always be competition, and never a single platform for any type of networking – I think the key to all of it… Web Services and standardization – for web apps at least. And thats what Web 2.0 is all about, from what I hear.

Anyway… One interesting web site that I haven’t seen too much coverage on is Metawishlist.com allows you to organize your wishlist by adding items while you browse the Internet and tagging them. The way it works is you use a bookmarklet and click it when you find something you want to add to one of your lists. It then opens a frame and captures as much product, image and pricing information from the page your on as possible. You fill out the rest and poof! its added to your list. This site does feature the ability to Import Your Amazon wishlist which is nice (and also how I came across it in the first place). You can see my lists and the Movies I want in my metawishlist section.

MetaWishList vs Kaboodle
I believe the ideas behind these two sites are similiar in some manners… But Kaboodle grasps a much bigger concept of everything, while MetaWishList focuses only on consumer products. Kaboodle seems to have been around a bit longer than MetaWishList and seems to be a bit more user friendly. However, MetaWishList has a search engine which is very useful… With Kaboodle there is no search engine (yet, they say “stay tuned” – so I will). The only way to navigate beyond the first page is the “Older >>” link at the bottom. And once you are logged in to the “My” section, you aren’t able to browse behind the homepage (am I missing something?). See my Kaboodle pages and compare the features to those of MetaWishList.

Another thing I noticed with Kaboodle is that there was no way to transfer an item from one list to another without removing it and going through the process again… Not very friendly.

You can also read this person’s ideas about a meta wishlist, or read more about Kaboodle at ComparisonEngines.com post Kaboodle – Social Shopping