Thursday, October 27, 2005

Kaboodle

So Kaboodle is what Keiron has been up to lately... Looks interesting!

It's basically a very simple "blog", specialized for bookmarks, but unlike del.icio.us and friends, the idea is that you create (some) topical pages and have a group of "items" on it - so your pages on Kaboodle become a "bag" of related things you want to share. Visitors can Vote and Comment on items on your Kaboodle pages, and your can keep your Kaboodle pages private and invite your friends only into it.

I have created two separate pages as a quick test. Am curious to see if I'll continue to actively use this... I'm... not sure. Actually, it depends for what, I think. This is just perfect to e.g. list a couple of... places to go, gifts, God knows what - and then ask friends, family, co-workers to have a look and comment and vote. I'll use it for that - only that, sorry, I don't do that every day! As a bookmark sharing social software, I think I'll probably stick with my del.icio.us for now though, and tags, search, clicking other users, etc. -- Interestingly, at least some of the pages you see on the Kaboodle homepage today show one item bookmark-ish kind of usage.

Others have blogged/written about more features that could be added, I am going to refrain - but I'm curious which direction they want to take this to... Clearly aimed at more of a "consumer" audience, and positioned somewhat differently / more specifically than general social "bookmarking", I'd expect them to add new features such as Searching, RSS, Tags etc. more conservatively, I mean slowly, if at all. Grandma doesn't tag - and doesn't need to, when creating a page with suggested dishes for the week-end get together.

I gathered from blogosphere that stuff like http://wists.com/ and http://www.clipmarks.com/ is the competition. On a very quick superficial look, Kaboodle UX seems simpler & neater - didn't check it out any further though.

Finally on a more technical note, I was skeptical when I read that when you click the "Add to Kaboodle" button you can add to your browser, Kaboodle would extract a headline, image/icon and a short summary. I have to say I am surprised how well this seems to work. Particularly the extraction of a Short Description - ignoring titles, menus and apparently trying to pick the first phrase seems reasonably robust. Can I get this method built-into an RSS reader - you know when fetching feeds with no content, get the page, strip stuff around, and just show the article's real content? ;-)

I'll leave it at this for - time to get some sleep. Keiron, best of luck with Kaboodle!!!

PS: Actually, here is one minor feature idea I ran into just while playing around: I added something to the wrong my page, and couldn't "move" it - so deleted and re-added it. Minor certainly.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks Michael, glad you had tried it out. We ran out of time to add the 'move' & 'copy' functions for the launch, there'll be there soon...you're not the only one who added something to the wrong page :-)

27 October, 2005 06:30  

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