July 19th, 2007
Boxedup, social bookmarking for "things you want"
Launching today, Boxedup is a social bookmarking service for “things you want”. Think of it as a universal wishlist (similar to Amazon’s wishlist but not confined to one company’s store), with bolted on social networking to make it easier to keep track of what products your friends are interested in, and as a way of discovering new items for yourself through the site’s other users. The service has evolved out of earlier effort by co-founder Jeremy Baines, called Gigtagging, which I profiled last November.
To begin using the service, after signing up, you’re required to install an add-on for Firefox or Internet Explorer, or if you prefer, use the provided ‘bookmarklet’. Then when you’re browsing an e-commerce site or product page, you can, with one click, begin adding a particular product to you Boxedup wishlist.
I visited Freecom’s store, and added a Skype speaker phone to my Boxedup wishlist. A bit like using the bookmaking service, delicious, I was given the option of editing the title (which was grabbed from the product page’s HTML title), and adding a description and keyword ‘tags’, as well as price. Boxedup also attempted to scrape any images from the page, but on this occasion didn’t offer me the image of the phone itself. Scraping is hardly an exact science — and a product like Boxedup is evidence that a standard micro-format for product pages would really benefit users. However, on most other occasions it worked just fine. Baines tells me that improving scraping is the company’s main priority, but without standards it’s a challenge for everybody.
Along with creating a ‘universal’ wishlist that works across any web store or product page, Boxedup offers a number of social features. Each user has the standard profile, with tabs taking you to their various lists of “things I want”, and “things I have”, as well as a page of people they’ve befriended on the site. With regards to the first two, the idea is that you can express which products you want, but also alert your social network when you’ve finally got them. The ‘friends’ are is where you can track other people’s Boxedup activity.
There’s quite a bit of power in the social aspect of Boxedup. For example, if you see an item in a friend’s list, you can nominate that you’ll purchase it for them so that they don’t receive a duplicate. There’s also lots of opportunity for discoverability. Each profile, for example, has a stream of activity similar to Facebook. This gives you a way — in near realtime — to see what items people in your social network are adding to their wishlist or have purchased etc. You can also get a snapshot of activity across the site as a whole, via the homepage, giving Boxedup a sort of StumbleUpon effect.
Overall I really like Boxedup, as it solves a genuine problem — universal wishlists — as well as using social networking features to good effect, where the social aspect actually adds something to its utility, rather than being yet-another network to maintain for the sake of it. The site is also really nicely designed too.
Steve O'Hear is a London-based consultant, educator, and journalist, focussing on the Internet and all aspects of digital technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
