SHOPPING SPREE: 18 Sites for Social Shopping & Deals

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Kaboodle was snapped up this week, but there are at least 17 other social shopping startups and sites worth checking out. Here's a quick roundup of the best places to share your shopping picks.

1. Crowdstorm

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Crowdstorm is an innovative social shopping service using product buzz in the blogosphere to help you find what to buy. You can even add your own favorite products and edit ones already in their databases. Commenting on products and adding to wish-lists is really simple. All of this corroborates into a great social shopping and recommendations system.

2. Etsy

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Etsy is a very nicely implemented, well designed social marketplace for handmade items. A more innovative eBay. The selection of items and active community contribute well to the overall shopping experience. Etsy is the place to look for unique handmade art, jewelery and much more.

3. Zebo

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A simple site made for lists of what you already own, not what you want. Some users list generic items, others, more focused towards brand names. You can even input pictures, youtube videos, and myspace slideshows into your lists. Zebo also features fairly simplistic and straight-forward social-networking, which allows you to add yourself to various networks and invite your friends. Not sold on that color scheme though.

4. ThisNext

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An interactive wish-list based shopping network with a recommendation system based on opinions from real people. You can add or recommend various products by entering their websites, or simply searching the service's database. You can also create wish-lists with the direct ability to buy the items from ThisNext. The service also incorporates trackbacks so you can drive a little traffic to your blog if you so wish. Nevertheless, its main feature is still its recommendation system which tells you what to buy next, thus, ThisNext.

5. Kaboodle

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Share product recommendations with the community and discover new stuff from users with similar tastes and styles. When you see something you're interested in buying, just click the bookmarklet and it'll fetch all of the necessary info; you can also browse what the community's been bookmarking and comment on their bookmarklets. Just sold to Hearst Magazines this week.

6. Wists

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Another wish-list creation service, Wists has the ability to create image bookmarks for anywhere on the web without uploading anything. After first adding your bookmarklets to your favorite items you can clip appropriate images and info from shopping sites to your Wists pages. A simple and effective application.

7. ShopWiki

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ShopWiki is another community based, very "web 2.0-ish" wiki, all about products. It's a good resource for quick background and price information on a wide-range of items.

8. Wisheus

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Simple, shared wish-lists. A nice alternative to more feature-rich sites if wish-lists are all you want.

9. Woot

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Woot provides you with one product daily for sale, and people in the forums participate in active feedback and comparisons using the available product allowing you to make educated shopping decisions. The active community contributes to your shopping experience.

10. BzzAgent

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BzzAgent is a program meant to initiate word-of-mouth Buzz via the delivery of free product samples to a developed list of volunteer candidates. In doing so, companies benefit from viral buzz.

11. Wishpot

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Allows you to easily create product wish-lists and share them with the community. Wishpot allows you to add items to your list by performing either an internal site search or using the browser clipping utility. The internal site-search also happens to be powered by shopping.com, which allows for many more advanced search features, including search by price or category. Wishpot also features mobile integration which enables you to add items to your list from your cell phone, or take a snapshot of an item and add it that way, also from your mobile phone. Another features that adds value to the service is inclusion of user information for better results and recommendations.

12. Buzzilions

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Buzzilions is a shopping review site based on reviews by "actual buyers". It offers some great, unique features, such as Buzzilions' Affinity Recommendations, which takes key points from your profile and matches you with other members using your product choices as a basis. Overall, Buzzilions is a viable option for consumers to begin product comparisons before buying.

13. Stylehive

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Build your own "hive" of your favorite products and share it with the community. While it's quite similar (and inevitably so) to many of the above, what sets it apart is its great use of item metadata and its effective use of images. For example, when a page is bookmarked, images are automatically included.

14. Glimpse

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Glimpse is a fashion resource site for women including featured articles in addition to an active marketplace of the latest looks. With Glimpse, it's easy to find trendy clothes and stay up to date on all the latest looks. You have the ability to save items from the marketplace into a wish-list of sorts. Those items can be sent to friends bought through the marketplace, or placed on sale alert, when you will be notified whenever the item goes on sale.

15. StyleFeeder

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An online "shopping companion" which assists you in shopping socially in real time, lets you see your "styletwins", gives you product recommendations and allows you to build wish-lists. StyleFeeder boasts its celebrity wishlists, too, featuring the likes of 50 Cent.

16. ShopStyle

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The more high-end of these services, ShopStyle features an active designer marketplace. Overall, a well-integrated one-stop-shop for all your designer fashions.

17. Reesycakes

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Reesycakes is yet another integrated shopping community, but with one additional feature: coupon codes. Not only that, but Reesycakes also offers great shopping guides and a comprehensive marketplace.

18. Osoyou

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Osoyou is a women's social-network based on shopping. Features include personalized product suggestions and other elements of social shopping. While the service hasn't officially launched, you can still sign up and be notified when it actually does.

What did we miss? Add more in the comments.