Wists is the next web 2.0 site to be bought
The last few months, three of the sites I use a lot has been bought: Flickr, Del.icio.us and Upcoming. All three of them by Yahoo. I think this will make these three sites even better, and I’m not concerned.
So who’s next? My bet: Amazon.com will buy Wists.com. Or maybe Yahoo shopping.
Why? It fits Amazon like a glove. They only need to add an extra “find this item on Amazon” under ever bookmarked item. Beacuse people will of course bookmark lots of stuff that’s NOT on Amazon. And being able to see what people bookmark at Wists all the time, would help them deciding which items to take into their store, which ones are popular outside Amazon, and what people in general wants. Some of the same reasons they bought 43things some time ago.
But for now, Wists isn’t owned by a big web company. But it’s still great!
If you haven’t used it, head over and make a new free account. Then drag the bookmarklet made for you to your browser bookmarks bar. Every time you see something on the net you would like to buy, click the Wists bookmark and Wists will show you a white page with all the pictures from the page you left. Click the picture of the object you want to buy (often there will be site icons, navigation arrows, ads and other pictures. But just choose the one that shows the object you wanted to bookmark).
When you have chosen your picture, the next page will ask you for tags. If you have bookmarked an iPod, you could tag it “ipod” and “christmas” and “Susan” (unless Susan knows about your Wists page and would discover that an iPod nano is heading for her christmas tree). To avoid that, you can mark items private. That way, only you can see them.
The items NOT marked private will show up on your Wists page, like these on my Wists page.
If you’re in a group, you could choose a tag that is special just for your group, like “ipod222albany”. You can see all items bookmarked with a certain tag by typing wists.com/everyone/ and then the tag. Like this: wists.com/everyone/ipod.
People use Wists for so much more than shopping: People bookmark Flickr pictures they like with the tag Flickr. And these are the items people have tagged “wishlist”. The most popular items on Wists are here.
There’s even whole sites based on Wists. Cribcandy labels itself “bookmarkable stuff for your home” and highlights cool stuff for your home. You can of course subscribe to the RSS feed of any user, like the Cribcandy Wists RSS or my Wists RSS). Or the RSS feed for a tag, like the iPod Wists RSS.
A few hacks:
1) Notice that when you are on Cribcandy or any page on Wists, you can copy any item you see to your Wists. There’s a link right under the picture (if your’e logged in).
2) Subscribe to all the Wists for a user by hitting “Add to my subscriptions” on a user page. So if you’re looking at my Wists page and want to subsribe to it, click Add (Oyvind) to my subscriptions.
3) If you want to make your won site, showing off cool things to boy or bookmark, just use Javascript to show your Wists on your site. Mine are here. Customize the settings first, then click “get code” in the lower left corner and copy the code to your site.
4) The Wists API lets you do all kinds of other neat stuff.
If you have more tips, add them in the comments below, or tip me! I would love to hear from you.
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