I Link You

Another Social Shopping site

With some wandering and guidance from Download Squad, I came upon another social shopping site called ThisNext.com. It is a free shopcasting network where you can discover, recommend, and share things you love. The concept is that everything on ThisNext is recommended by real people. In other words, I would trust my techie genius best friend than a random reviewer on Newegg.

What is shopcasting? Shopcasting is a way for someone to tell a bunch of people about a thing he or she loves. It basically combines "shopping" with "broadcasting," so it's trying to catch onto the podcasting craze in America.

There are three tabs to choose from: Discover, Recommend, and Shopcast. All three categories are self-explanatory. One can click on "Discover" to find out about products one normally does not find easily or at a local store. It can be anything from thermometer cufflinks to a dot matrix watch. There is a number of familiar items that include the iconic IPOD, UGG boots, and MacBook Pro.

You can also make recommendations by entering the item's name or URL or use the Bookmarklet! function. Dragging ThisNext's bookmarklet up to your browser's bookmark toolbar is supposedly the easiest and fastest way to shopcast while you're surfing the web. This is similar to Digg This! function found on the popular social networking app, Digg. When clicked, the Bookmarklet! feature will capture the item and save it to you ThisNext account.

You can also create wishlists from the items you found on the sites and upload your own pictures of these items. Then you can tag these items so that other people can search for them. Additional social networking aspects include users' profiles so that you can further investigate whether this person actually knows what he or she is doing.

What do I think? There are just too many sites that serve the same function. Although it's kind of nice that real people are the ones who are making the recommendations, that's the only thing that differentiates ThisNext from other sites. I don't feel like there is a need to have another third party help me decide what to buy online. Amazon and Newegg offer similar functions while I am able to see the prices of these products and order them directly from these sites. Although I may trust my techie friend's advice more than a random stranger techie, if there are 200+ people highly recommending the product in question, then I have no reserve against buying something using strangers' advice.

Overall, nice idea... but it's a hard sell for me to use it frequently.

posted by Koh @ 1:15 PM