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Tired of being asked over and over what you'd like for Christmas/your birthday/whatever? Tired of trying to get some kind of clue what the people on your list for these days would like? The Universal Gift Registry will make your life a whole lot easier.
This new gift registry would look somewhat
like the fakebakery web site fishrat created when the halfbakery was down, only instead of categories all you'd have it account names. When you clicked on an account there would be a simple list of annual events with a description of items the user would like for each occasion. Each item would also be linked to one or more links to places online that you could find it. No more running around hunting for just the right gift. Just click and you've got it.
There are a couple of differences between this and other registries.
1. It's not store-specific. Links could made to a variety of stores. The more links the better, just in case the first store ran out.
2. It's occasion-specific but not occasion-limited. Under each user all of the usual annual events would be included - Christmas, Hanukkah, birthday, anniversary - with appropriate requests for each occasion.
3. It's a single-signon solution. You don't have to register at several different web sites.
Froogle Shopping List
http://froogle.google.com/shoppinglist
almost baked (beta) [krelnik, Dec 21 2004]
[link]
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krelnik - I just tested out that link. Two questions that didn't have obvious answers: |
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1. Can I separate my wishes by event so I can load a whole year's worth of wishes at once? (Or look several months down the road to see what my wife wants for her anniversary?) |
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2. Can I type in items that I can't find a link for (or at least not a desirable link)? |
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The fakebakery format would let me do both of the above. |
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May I suggest that your are approaching this from the wrong side?. It's much more fun to look yourself, and small children cannot make use of this service.
Failing that, why not just add some notes into your MS Outlook* calendar and synch with everyone in your address book?. |
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*Sorry mac users!. Bah Humbug! |
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gnome - I'm not real big on shopping so it would be nice if my friends and family made it easier by putting their lists out there (I know I know, it's pretty selfish of me. I'd be willing to do it for them though so it's not entirely selfish.) |
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Outlook isn't universal enough to handle this task though. A web site would be much more accessible to everyone, including as it would MAC users, groupwise users, etc... |
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As for the kids, their parents could always create a wish list for them. It would be easier on them than repeating the same list over and over again to all of the aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, etc.. |
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you could just open a yahoo account and put stuff in the to-do list and give people the passwords. |
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[longshot], I realise that - I bunned the idea because it would take the guesswork and questions out of what can be a tricky and time consuming process. I do, however, think that things like wedding lists are a bit 'cheesy/expectant' and somehow detract from the magic and the spontaneity of any given event. I would hate to reduce the whole process of Birthdays, Christmas etc. to a wish list that is created by, and expected of, everyone. Advertising is doing this too well already!. |
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How about a reverse-auction interface for vendors to bid on supplying each item, with the prices invisible to the giftee? |
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Making something invisible to just one person is very hard - to do that, you'd have to have a central id that everybody has exactly one of, all different, and such systems are hornet's nests of privacy problems. |
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To me, gifts are all about the guesswork and the different perspectives of the givers; wishlists are completely pointless. Obviously, that's not a universally shared opinion! |
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But suspending that for a moment, [longshot9999], why would you want to distinguish the things you want by occasion, rather than having a central list? There's some item X that you'd want, say, for your birthday, but would reject if given it at any other occasion? |
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//type in items that I can't find a link for//
Don't think Froogle handles that, but I think you are on to something. Current wish lists are all very concrete, which takes much of the fun and all of the surprise out of it. It would be cool to be able to put in something more general, like "a heavy sweater. here are pictures of two I like somewhat, and three I hate." Turning that into useful vendor links (so you can earn money doing this) would be an interesting problem to solve. |
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Had a quick look at Froogle. Do those subscribers get targetted spam, I wonder?
Could be useful in that sense. |
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This still wouldn't have helped that one Christmas when
my father and I gave each other exactly the same gift. |
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There's another problem with store based gift registries -
it's not allowed, usually, to simply say "I want a toaster."
Because it's stored by item code, you have to say "I want a
[Brand] [Model] [Colour] Toaster, for [Price]." It takes all
the fun out of it. |
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JakePatterson - Excellent feature, although I don't think I'd go to the trouble of making the prices invisible. Most people know roughly what their gifts cost anyway. What I'd suggest is that vendors be allowed to either pay a flat fee or a per link fee to add a link for any gift someone wants (thereby making the Universal Gift Registry financially viable). The links would be like those in the halfbakery with only the company name, item price, and URL listed (and the company could only update its own links). Then the buyer could click on the link and see if they want to buy the item from that company. Price wouldn't be the only consideration in this case, at least not for me. Ease of navigation on the site counts a lot. I would pay more (and have paid more) to order something from a site that makes it easy to do business. |
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jutta - I know it may look kind of tacky at first, but I look at it this way. When someone asks me what I want for Christmas I have 2 choices, give them an answer or avoid giving them one. Since they're making an effort to do something nice for me I don't make it harder by making them guess. I give them an answer. Putting those answers down ahead of time on a gift registry just makes it even easier for them. I realize some people don't ask though because they prefer to pick out something that will be a surprise. This new web site obviously wouldn't be something they'd use unless they ran into a time crunch, or had a few names on their list that they were just buying gifts for because it was the polite thing to do. |
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As for the question about why I'd break it down by events, it's not that I'd reject something for my birthday that I wouldn't reject on other occasions. It's more a question of reasonability. The gifts our family gives on birthdays are usually less expensive than the ones we give on Christmas (except the ones I give my wife of course). Breaking the gift ideas down by event gives me a chance to keep unreasonably expensive gifts off of my birthday wish list. Anniversary gifts are usually occasion-specific too, and gift-giver specific too for that matter. They're not usually the same kind of gift that would show up on a Christmas list. |
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El Dorado - More like www.makemylifeeasier.com |
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[jutta] - When I suggested making the prices invisible to the giftee I was presuming that the giftee would be likely to cooperate. The website need only set a cookie on that user's browser, and it would be programmed to show the prices bid by vendors for gifts requested by other people, but not the owner of the cookie's vendor-bid prices. Obviously quite easy to defeat if the giftee were determined, but then why would they go to the bother of using such a site in the first place? Anywho, I also find the idea of simply "placing one's order" for holiday gifts to be a little tacky, but supposing the list was exhostive, as in, "here is a list of everything I can think of that I like" which would avoid the tacky ramifications of the "here is what to buy me" list, in that one could not resonably expect to receive everything (or even one tenth of everything) on the list. The giftee's various distant relitaves would also have an easier time avoiding duplicate gift giving, and your closer and more creative or romantic giftors would hopefully feel free to ignore the list and suprise you, maybe even coming up with something you didn't even realize that you wanted. |
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