Gift Tagging brings universal wish lists to MySpace

Gift Tagging is a social wish list service which was launched a few months ago by the British design house This Side Up. The site allows users to create a universal wish list, thereby solving the problem of having various lists scattered around the web tied to different online shopping sites.

Once signed up you simply install the provided bookmarklet, Firefox plugin or Internet Explorer toolbar, and then as you browse the web it takes one click to start the process of adding a product to your universal wish list. However, unlike shop specific wish lists such as the one provided by Amazon, you're required to manually fill in the product's information including price, description, and (optionally) keywords. This isn't the fault of gifttagging.com but is the result of shopping sites which (like most of the web) don't publish structured data. A job for the semantic web maybe?

The service does however attempt to scrape for images displayed on a product's page, so that you can include a thumbnail of each item. Although in practice I found this didn't always work as it should. For example when trying to add the Nintendo Wii to my wish list (one can live in hope) the service didn't seem to offer up all of the images displayed on the product's page, and instead I had to settle for a picture of a gift-wrapped box rather than one of the available images of the Wii itself.

A social networking aspect to the service allows users to search for and keep track of other people's wish lists. User's also have the option to create a widget to display their current wish list or items already owned, which can then be added to blogs or profile pages on any social network that allows Flash to be embedded. 

In a brief email exchange I asked Jeremy Baines (founder of This Side Up) about Gift Tagging's business model. At the moment the service offers Amazon affiliate links to items featured in a wish list, although Baines said that this is just an interim solution and that the company was exploring a number of other possible options including price comparison tie ins.

Summary

Gift Tagging provides a simple way for user's to create and manage a universal wish list. The service is well designed (though the image scraping needs improvement) and any shortcomings are mostly down to the lack of structured data provided by shopping sites.

If you are a company about to launch an exciting new social web service or product and would like me to take a look, get in touch.