Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Back in the wacky days of the dot com bubble, I had this idea which I’m sure at least a few (thousand?) other people did to create a website that was basically about wish lists. I had an Amazon.com wish list (which I still do), but part of the problem was at least at that time they were primarily about books, CD’’s. I had another wish list on buy.com for my electronics items, and probably a couple of others for yet more product categories. Lots of companies had their own wish lists for the products they sold, which was a horribly decentralized way of going about something like this. Why not, I thought, have a one-stop service where you could search for products among dozens if not hundreds of different merchants and the database of products you wanted would be kept on this third-party site rather than on all the individual ones. A central store, that is, for wish lists.

I feel a bit odd about finally “going public” with this idea, except for the fact that I’m sure it’s been attempted and the fact that I can’t think of an actual site that tried to do this means that it wasn’t very successful. Since those days, Amazon has expanded into many more product categories, so I no longer need to have a wish list at Buy.com. But it still is limited in many ways. For example, they simply don’t have certain brands of products when it comes to Audio/Video equipment which is easily attainable from Best Buy or Circuit City. So maybe there is a market for this somewhere and I’ll be kicking myself if it actually takes off. The problem, I think, is that companies don’t want to farm out their product database to third parties, at least not the big guys like Amazon.com.

Just today there’s a piece on J-Walk about another player stepping up, and their idea is pretty similar to mine! Google has had a feature called Froogle for a while now which allows users to check for the lowest prices for a given product among a database of many vendors. They have now attached wish-list functionality to Froogle, and called it Froogle Shopping List. I played around with it for just a little while and it works pretty much the way you would expect but it is still pretty bare-bones. You can add items to your list, delete them, and edit little notes attached to each item like with Amazon’s wish list. You can’t, however, specify how many you want of a given item, nor, more importantly, can you rate it from 1 to 5 in terms of how much you actually want it. That last one is actually a fairly recent feature of Amazon’s and one initially that seems a bit silly. I mean why would you put something on a wish list that you don’t want people to buy you? That brings me to another use for wish lists – wish lists as just bookmarks of sorts.

Ever since I had a wish list on Amazon, I would put stuff on it that I had no plans on buying myself, or expectation that others would. Some of these were just interesting books I’d heard about, but others were items that were well beyond my means and of course nothing that a friend or family would ever buy me. Up until recently, there was no way on Amazon to distinguish between things you just wanted to save for reference purposes in a database you thought you’d always have access to online, and those things you actually were considering buying or thought others might buy for you. Unfortunately, when you edit or more importantly view an Amazon wish list, you still cannot sort based on this important field. I’m not sure why since this would enable you to quickly see the things that the person in question is most interested in. Google has a slightly different approach so far. As I mentioned, there is no field to rate how much you want a product. However, there IS a field that Amazon does not have, a field for making an item public or not. So while you can’t specify if something is a “love to have” vs. a just “like to have” you can just make something visible or not. So in a way it is better because people don’t have to read the fine print about whether you want something to level 5 or level 4. If it’s on your list, they can just buy it. Or, if you really want to explain to people how much (or how little) you want something; you can always add an explanation in the notes field.

The other nice thing that Amazon has which Google still doesn’t is a mechanism for categorizing products so you can sort or filter stuff based on a product category. Say you’re only interested in getting a friend a book. Well, you just filter their wish list for only books. Amazon can do this easily because they already have all their merchandise categorized. Google, of course, is just pulling items from lots of different vendors’ databases, and I’m sure many of them don’t have category fields, and if they do, they probably aren’t consistent with other vendors, so Google can’t automatically assign a category to a product. However, what they could do fairly easily is to let you the customer assign categories. They could either create a standard set of categories or better yet let the customer create them. This way you wouldn’t just be limited to having a books and movies and electronics category, but you could actually have a category for yourself, a category for your kids, a category for a special event (Amazon has special baby and wedding registries which are completely separate from your standard wish list), etc.

The big thing that Google has going for it is that you can choose to buy from many different vendors, finding the cheapest vendor for a given product, or just the one you trust most. Amazon is primarily a one-price shop (although you can have different prices if you opt to pick it up at one of their partner retail stores like Circuit City). But while this is a big advantage for Google, it’s also not nearly as you might think it would be. For example, when you are picking something to put in your wishlist, you have to pick a product from a specific vendor. This may sound obvious, but what happens if another vendor kicks it’s price down $100 less than your chosen vendor after you pick them? All you or the person looking at your wish list will see is that product you picked which is no longer the cheapest price. You can, of course, pick multiple items, but this would just make the wishlist unwieldy, especially if you can’t filter it! Say you pick 10 different pieces of consumer electronics, 20 different movies, and 10 different books. If you just include 5 different vendors for each product, that’s already 200 entries in your wish list! I have over 300 items on my Amazon wish list, so if I wanted to recreate this, we’re talking about over 1000 items if I want just four vendors per item! Google needs a way of implementing wish list items that aren’t specific to a vendor, but rather are based on the title of an item. That way, I can give the model number and brand of a piece of hardware, or even be less specific and say “400GB Hard Drive” and Google will put this into my wish list and when people click on this it will bring them to a search results page where all such items are listed. The only problem with this is one that I’ve found inherent to their Froogle price-search engine. That it can’t distinguish between, say, a Treo 600 phone and just a hands-free headphone for Treo 600 when your search is “Treo 600.” You can filter your results if you play with it a little. For example, I was able to successfully filter out all but the actual Treo 600 phone by searching for “Treo 600 –GPS” and specifying a price range of $200 to $700. This looks for all instances of Treo 600 that don’t also have “GPS” in the title and range from $200 to $700 in price. I figured that price range would get rid of the vast majority of accessories for the Treo, and would probably never actually exclude the phone, since the lowest I’ve seen it for ever has been $399, or maybe it was $350. Obviously this is not the most user-friendly method of creating a listing, and maybe this is one reason it hasn’t been implemented yet, but the bottom line is that Google’s wish list is sitting on top of this incredibly powerful engine which is only being used once - to create the wishlist item for the first time.

Froogle also doesn’t seem to index anything from Amazon, which is a shame since there are certain things, the new Criterion Collection Holiday 2004 Gift Set being an example, that Amazon sells exclusively. I’m not even sure why this is the case since Google would theoretically be driving customers to Amazon, and Amazon does have an affiliate system. I can only suspect that Amazon has some corporate reason they want to keep people on their site using their wish list which I’m sure they’ve worked hard at developing and maintaining. And while centralization of some things is bad, I think in this case a central “authority” for wishlist creation would be helpful. What it might even develop into is some kind of open source xml-based standard like RSS that would allow for universal publication and distribution of your wishlist outside of Amazon and wish list creation tools which have nothing to do with a single proprietary company. But for now, Google’s wish list seems a step in the right direction, albeit one that needs work…