Chris & Naomi Hathaway Home

I've been looking quite a while for a good place to put together my wishlist recently.  I've had a few requirements:

• I have to be able to add an item from anywhere on the web, as long it has a name, description, and price.
• I should be able to prioritize the items, or at least order them how I would like.
• People can indicate that they have bought a gift, but I can't see that unless I choose to.
• It should be publicly viewable.
• I should be able to comment on the items, or give some indication of how much I want them.

And maybe some others...I forget.  Anyway, after looking around for a while, I finally settled on Froogle's shopping lists, because they were the only ones I could find that didn't limit choices to the site your wishlist was on (Amazon, Newegg, etc.).  But there were still problems: you could only add something if Froogle had indexed it, it put things in a default order, and no one could indicate for whether they had gotten a gift, for others to see.  I actually wrote them an email addressing these issues; they replied with the standard "We have plans for many new features ahead, so keep checking back."  Well, I know how Google Beta programs go; Beta is about all you get for around a year.

Anyway, I finally found something that met all of my needs and did it with pretty darn good technologies. It's called Kaboodle, and I would highly recommend it to everyone out there.  A small startup from Santa Clara, these guys have really figured it out.  They've developed a very cool algorithm for taking any product page and extracting out the important information about the item: it's name, description, price and picture.  Plus, they've just started, so features will be pouring in in the near future, I imagine.  So, with a handy button on my Firefox toolbar, I just navigate to the place where the product is that I want, click a button, and usually it gets exactly the right things from the page.  In the rare cases it misses a bit, it's very easy to fix.  And the result?  Well, look at my wishlist and see what you think. Then create your own!