After doing the whole wish list things from ThinkGeek, I think I might have developed a cool idea. Thinkgeeks’s wish list is a good idea, but it is limited to Thinkgeek’s site. What if instead it were possible to go to any site and build a list. It could be a really nice thing for several reasons. It would make it easier for distant relatives to get birthday presents and Xmas presents. No more searching to try and find the place you were looking at something the other day.
Someone would have to provide the central server and database. If anyone wanted to see the other people’s lists they just hit the frontend and request it. You could have some ads on the front of this for revenue and also have some products that you are reselling for a web site. Maybe behind the scenes you can search out better prices on the items and give the people a better price whilest skimming some of the difference.
Since the site is just the proxy it really wouldn’t have to worry about credit cards, shipping, or anything. Perhaps it would be a time saver if it kept track of the shipping address for the people that have their lists, so that the purchasers wouldn’t have to know that, but that and the other info that it would have to have would most likely be non-secure and therefore not too much of a privacy concern.
The way it COULD work would be that as people browse there is a link in their shortcut bar or something along those lines. When they get to an item that they would like to add then they just click the shortcut and it posts the URL to it along with their login information to the “wish list” servers and it gets added to their list. Maybe ask them for a description or something, maybe it could be extracted from the page. Heck it could be possible to form partnerships with web sites such that there sites are listed on our page and their pages contain the information in a format that we can sure fire remove from the page. Therefore anything that gets posted from their pages has all the information you could ever want by default. It might be possible to do this with the link (kind of like googles search bar and quick links) or there might have to be some kind of software on the machines.
I think this idea requires further investigation and checking……