Stylefeeder: Feed Your Internet Shopping Desires
Stylefeeder is a shopping community site with a focus on the familiar trappings of social bookmarking sites. To say Stylefeeder is just a social bookmarking site focused on shopping is not entirely accurate. It is that, but because the bookmarks are products and because the community is public, Stylefeeder is actually a shopping site in its own right.
Stylefeeder is the shopaholics friend, rather than trying to maintain a wishlist on Amazon, Yahoo and others, you can keep everything in one place. Stylefeeder offers a nice bookmarklet for your browser’s toolbar. When you’re on a site that has something you’d like to buy, just click the bookmarklet and it will be saved to your Stylefeed.
The bookmarklet features a nice piece of Javascript that lets you select any image on the bookmarked page to use for that bookmark. It’s so dead simple even your grandmother could use it.
Stylefeeder helps you create a wishlist or just track products you’re interested in. Stylefeeder has all the features you’d expect from a social bookmarking site such as tags, ratings, RSS feeds and groups.
Unlike a lot of more traditional social bookmark sites, Stylefeeder is decidedly not geek-oriented, in fact the Leica camera I bookmarked looked decidedly out of place on the front page, sandwiched between a kimono dress and a yoga outfit.
Once you add a page to your stylefeed you can keep track of it via RSS, share it with a group if you’re a member or email it to a friend. There’s also an OPML feed, which means if you’re tech savvy you could pull your Stylefeed content into just about anywhere.
For those that want to display their wishlist on a blog or MySpace page, Stylefeeder offers some cut-and-paste code that will embed a nice Flash widget on whatever page you would like. You should be aware that some blog sites block Flash plugins, LiveJournal comes to mind, so the widget may or may not work depending on the service you use.
In my cursory browsing I noticed that so far Stylefeeder’s users aren’t making heavy use of the comments feature which is a bit disappointing since half of what I look for when I’m shopping online is user commentary on a product. Perhaps as the site grows users will start taking advantage of the comments feature.
Stylefeeder has another nice feature called Watchlists that let you track what other users bookmark. This allows you in effect to use other Stylewatchers as personal shoppers, just find someone whose taste you like and every time they add a new product you’ll get notified.
The one thing Stylefeeder doesn’t feature that I would like to have seen is some kind of price tracking. Since reviewing Offertrax for Monkey Bites, I’ve grown semi-addicted to the idea of tracking prices via RSS. Stylefeeder is decidedly more fun and better looking than Offertrax, but Offertrax has a feature set that’s tough to beat.
