Best Buy's Giftag enables wish list creation across the Web

SAN DIEGO--Best Buy launched at DemoFall on Tuesday an online gift registry that enables people to create lists of items they want from any Web site and share that list with others.

Best Buy demonstrated a version in Firefox and said an Internet Explorer version will be available soon.

Basically, you click on the Giftag icon in the browser bar, pulling up a window at the bottom for adding items to a list. If the site supports the Microformats standard, you can just click on the item you want and the specs are added to the Giftag window. You can add tags and create a new list or add it to another list.

If the Web site doesn't support the standard, which most retailers won't, you can highlight and select the item and description and it pulls the information automatically into the Giftag window.

You can e-mail the list to anyone and it will include links they can click to make purchases.

There is integration with Facebook so all your friends there can see your wish list and buy gifts for you.

Other social networks will be included later, as will mobile support, the company said. The application programming interface will also be made available to developers to create other applications.

[chrsoz]

Interesting move by Best Buy, and good to see a major retailer embracing hProduct (although support generally seems to be a bit thin so far, but it's early days as you say).

We're also excited about hProduct and it's potential to standardize and enable product-related data, and it's something that's in the plan for boxedup.com (we're a broader shopping utility, but with similar characteristics, including wish/gift lists to help make the giving and getting process painless; we're not aligned to one specific retailer though).