ipod shuffle: Keep Track of Wish and Gift Lists with Kaboodle

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Keep Track of Wish and Gift Lists with Kaboodle

It’s September and supermarkets are rolling out their Christmas goods: gingerbread, stollen, cookies, and more. Ridiculous, isn’t it? What’s even more ridiculous is that some of these delicacies will expire before Christmas. Anyways, maybe this is a good time to think about presents and collect ideas both for what you would like to receive and [...]

Kaboodle is a handy tool that can help you save and remember items you found online, organize them in lists, which in turn can be made public and shared with others. More generally it can also be used to collect information, but there may be better tools available for this task.

Nicely hidden at the very bottom of every page is the option to “Get the Buttons “. What they mean is “Get the Extension”, which at this point is available for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. I’ll focus on the Firefox extension here.

Once the extension is installed and Firefox is restarted, you can enable the Kaboodle Toolbar. Right-click into an empty spot of any toolbar in Firefox and set a checkmark in front of the “Kaboodle Toolbar”.
Instead of activating the whole toolbar, you can also take the single buttons and place them wherever you like. Right-click into an empty spot of any toolbar in Firefox and select “Customize” from the menu. Then drag and drop the Kaboodle buttons into a desired location, for example on the Navigation toolbar.

Now that your browser is Kaboodle compatible, you can add items with the click of a button. This will work on any website. When you click “Add to Kaboodle” or the respective button, the extension will extract information and open a menu that lets you fix the details or add more information manually. If the spontaneous extraction doesn’t look right, click “fix details” at the bottom and you will be able to select another image, define your own, enter a custom title, change the description and add highlights.

Clicking “Submit” will of course add the item to the list you picked and it will take you right back to the original website.

Back in Kaboodle you can do a lot more than just manage your items and lists. There is a whole network available through which users can share their lists, recommendations or ideas. You can add friends, join groups, follow specific brands, and much more.

Personally, I have decided to keep it simple and am maintaining only three lists: ‘gathered’, ‘wish list’ and ‘gift list’.