Webware

StyleFeeder, a social shopping site that aims to do for the retail sector what StumbleUpon did for browsing or Last.fm did for music, has announced that it's pulled in $2 million in Series A venture funding from Highland Capital Partners and Schooner Capital.

The start-up, based in Cambridge, Mass., plans to use the $2 million to hire more employees.

StyleFeeder, which has operated until this point on seed funding, operates a "recommendation engine" for fashionistas based on which products users rate and then purchase through affiliates. Much like other recommendation sites, StyleFeeder then suggests related products and can connect users with similar taste.

The company additionally operates a Facebook application that has been installed by 500,000 users (overall, not active users). That pales in comparison with the 2.5 million who log into Slide's FunWall daily, but it's just slightly under the approximately 570,000 who play that horrifically controversial Facebook game, Scrabulous, each day. Basically, the application reaches a fairly decent number of eyes.

The social shopping niche is crowded with start-ups like ThisNext and StyleHive, as well as M&A buys like ShopStyle (purchased by Sugar Inc.) and Kaboodle (snapped up by Hearst Corp. last year). There has, at least until this point, been no clear front-runner in the space.

Late on Tuesday night, the news broke on the Wall Street Journal's Web site that publishing empire Hearst Corp. has made plans to acquire Kaboodle, a social shopping site that launched last year and now draws in over two million unique visitors per month. Like rivals ThisNext and StyleHive, Kaboodle lets members recommend and learn about new products through compiling lists; it also connects users who have similar shopping tastes.

Hearst and Kaboodle issued a joint press release on Wednesday morning announcing the acquisition deal. "With its impressive technology, tools and audience, Kaboodle is a natural overlap for Hearst Magazines," Cathleen P. Black, president of Hearst Magazines, said in the statement. "We think Kaboodle has terrific potential for many of our brands, especially in the fashion, beauty and consumer technology categories. Our readers will be able to find the products featured in our magazines, shop electronically with their friends and get their feedback. It's another means for making sure our readers stay engaged in today's saturated media landscape."

Kaboodle will become a property of Hearst Interactive Media and Hearst Magazines Digital Media. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but blog reports have suggested that it's as much as $40 million.

Journalists and bloggers have been quick to note that recent months have seen a sizeable number of Internet start-up acquisitions (and rumors thereof) by large media companies, many of which are headquartered in New York or Los Angeles rather than Mountain View or Redmond. In May, finance news video blog Wallstrip was purchased by CBS Interactive and media-sharing site Photobucket was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media; more recently, environmental blog TreeHugger was acquired by Discovery Communications, and the latest rumor is that social bookmarking site Clipmarks is in the midst of a deal with Forbes.

GigaOm's Om Malik noted on Tuesday night that "from a Silicon Valley perspective, emergence of buyers outside of the G-Y-M (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) triumvirate is a good thing."

Social shopping Web sites let you track things you'd like to buy and display them on a social networking profile or blog. The style snapshot can serve as a portable gift registry or just a conversation-starter with people who share your style sensibilities. Most of these services provide a browser button so you can easily tag goods you find while Web surfing, in addition to integrating with MySpace, Facebook, or Friendster.

The makers of ThisNext coined the term "shopcasting" to describe its banners that let you display your favorite stuff on a blog or MySpace page. ThisNext is strong for tracking a niche interest; many of its users flag eco-friendly goods, for instance.

Kaboodle's cute site design kept me clicking longer than its competition. Its groups let me humor a passion for vintage sterling jewelry and search for custom tags to find Veronica Lake-era fashion. The community is diverse and creative at Kaboodle, similar to the Etsy crafts marketplace. Plus, tagging is faster than at rival sites. I recommend it.

Wists also let you track a wide range of dry goods, like flip-flops, a guillotine pendant necklace, or a pinball machine. But small usability details irked me, such as needing to type the underscore symbol when adding multiple tags to an item. Although offering less flexibility, as well as an awkward set-up process, MyPickLists will send you a small kickback if someone buys an item on your wish list.

The interface of Glimpse looks nice with earth tones, but I'd like to make fewer mouse clicks there; even a dropdown search bar would help. Glimpse's makers might be wise to capitalize more on its celebrity profiles, say, by letting you add a star's outfit to your personal StyleFile. (I'd have to travel to another decade to use this kind of feature, but others might like it.)

ShopStyle (also here) is free of advertising. It offers staple women's magazine suggestions, like dressing for your body "type," and it irritatingly takes you straight to a store's shopping cart once you click on something. It just launched in February, however, so maybe more interesting features will come later.

Stylehive lets users lead or follow each other's style selections, but merchants may be lurking in disguise, as the Wall Street Journal noted recently. StyleHive is less intuitive than Kaboodle, but it kept me entertained. Yahoo's Shoposphere lets you create pick lists, but I found it boring.

These startup shopping sites, particularly Kaboodle and ThisNext, make it fun to discover cool stuff, but I want them to do so much more, especially when it comes to clothes. The print Lucky Magazine does a better job of laying out outfits than these Web pages do. If you're built like a brick house, wouldn't you appreciate a service that takes your measurements to help account for each brand's variations in size? Mass customization is popular for T-shirts, but the trend still has a long way to go.

I find only a few benefits to shopping for apparel online. In stores, there's no defense from cruel dressing-room lighting, but you can try on anything bought on the Internet in your own boudoir. Plus, weeding out deals on the Web can be easier than scrounging through retail basement bargain bins. More social shopping sites should ping you when items go on sale, as Glimpse, What's Buzzing, and Deal Bundle do.

Other than those conveniences, however, no interface can match the tactile pleasures of shopping in a real world emporium. I'll take thumbing through piles of cashmere any day over clicking through uncozy clouds of text tags online. And who can guess accurately from a flat thumbnail image that some jeans will fit well? Too often you'll find the pair to be too snug, but only after you've already paid and had them shipped home.

I'd like to play with a digital paper doll approach to Web shopping that would let you mix, match, and assemble outfits on an avatar (See also FashMatch). It's odd that IM apps don't already let you shop that way (Second Life is limited, too.).

UPDATE: Retailers at ShopStyle do not masquerade as users, as I cited originally from a Wall Street Journal report, which that paper later corrected.

USuggest, which launched today, lets you make money when you mention products in your blog, e-mails, or forum posts. It's not the first "affiliate marketing" product out there, and in its current alpha test stage it's not quite robust enough to use regularly, but it's got some interesting tweaks on the concept.

If you mention a product, why not sell it too?

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Nearly every retailer out there has a program to cut you in on profits if you drive sales to its online store. What USuggest does is aggregate all these deals together so you don't have to pick one store to do your business with. If you want to use affiliate marketing in your blog that's a plus, although you might also just use Amazon's program, which is much more mature and doesn't lack in product selection.

USuggest offers something different, though: Although you can create an affiliate link to a single product, CEO Hasan Davulcu strongly believes that products sell better when displayed in context with other products and recommendations. So one of the key activities for sellers on USuggest is tagging products. Once you tag a product, it will appear alongside other products tagged the same way, and if somebody buys a product from one of these auto-generated comparisons, the person who tagged it will get a commission. (Oddly, though, you can't create your own tags. You have to select from a list, and I don't know who wrote the options, but some of them are bizarre.) Bloggers can link directly to tagged collections, which are much more likely to generate sales. We find the same thing in CNET.com's reviews--readers find comparisons more useful and actionable than single product write-ups.

It's an interesting twist on both affiliate marketing and social shopping, but I found the site incompletely implemented. There were products I should have been able to find and couldn't, and features that didn't work as advertised. It's also conceptually complicated. Affiliate marketing is complex enough; USuggest is also a social shopping site and a vertical search engine. These concepts do not work in harmony on the site. USuggest's navigation needs work.

By the way, here's a USuggest link to a Dyson vacuum cleaner. If you buy it, I'll get half the commission (commissions average 10 percent of sales) and will donate any income to charity.

See also: MyPickList, Squidoo, Yub, and, of course, PayPerPost.

Last week we covered Shoutback, a shopping site that adds Digg-like voting functionality to a front page and upcoming deals. Iliketotallyloveit is similar, but it has a much wider array of products, and the page design really catches the eye. Every deal gets its own picture and a short description. Deals are voted on by clicking the giant hearts, and doing so toggles between "i like totally love it" and "been there done that." If you've used Digg before, you get the idea.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

To help you find out what's hot on iliketotallyloveit, there's LiveLoveIt, a real-time snapshot of which items people are submitting, voting on, and talking about. The quick view is a nice touch, and when it's really going you can get a feel for which products are up and coming versus what's already been promoted on the front page. Again, it's not much different from Digg's DiggSpy tool, but it's useful nonetheless.

After submitting about a half-dozen URLs, I found that the site didn't manage to grab photos or descriptions. It wasn't too painful to enter the information manually, but it would be nice to have the fields filled out automatically or at least to have pull the product picture in without me having to first save it and then upload it. The one saving grace is a bookmarklet that you can add to your favorite browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera are supported) to take you directly to the Add Stuff submission form.

There's a certain charm about iliketotallyloveit. What it lacks in true originality it makes up for in personality and the quality of submitted content. I wish we had come across this site earlier in the month so I could have found some great quirky holiday gifts like a leather-and-chrome Rubik's cube or a copy of The Zombie Survival Guide.

Collaboration and shopping are two things that often go very wrong during the holidays. With families spread across the country, joint gifting gets that much harder. For example, this morning, my brother sent me a concerned e-mail about what to get our parents for the holidays. Historically, this is an event that almost always ends in a frantic rush with too much money spent on a gift that ends up sitting in a closet the minute we leave the house. Buddy Shopping is a new collaborative tool that combines screen sharing and instant messaging with a dash of social networking. Buddy Shopping isn't the first service of its kind, as ThisNext and StyleHive have already created a way for people to share shopping items they're interested in. Buddy Shopping takes it to the next level by letting you share live Web browsing with another shopper, so each of you see what the other person is looking at in real-time. The service is technically free but there are small (yet very distracting) video ads with audio that pop up on the left side every minute or so. The built-in IM client lets you shop and talk with the other person in complete silence--good for shopping at work, if you work in a cubicle.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Buddy Shopping has user-created communities that make it easier to befriend others who shop for similar items. One weak point is that there's no live master list of people who are using the service, which makes hopping on without a planned rendezvous a solo affair. The good news is that you don't need communities to figure out what to shop for, as the site has a preloaded set of online stores by genre, and you can bookmark your own sites in a custom folder.

Another area where Buddy Shopping falls short is its ease of use. For a system designed to make buying simpler, it requires users to delve through several info panes to get what they want. In most cases, visiting Web sites becomes an arduous process when you're using less than half the space you're used to because Buddy Shopping shows your browser at the top of the screen and your buddy's beneath it. And as long as they're offering collaborative shopping, why not offer a service like HomeSlyce or Buxfer that let users share the cost of purchase?

Is Buddy Shopping better than sending URLs by e-mail? In most cases (like mine) a simple 5-minute telephone conversation sorted out the joint-gift issue, which is a lot easier than having both parties download, install, and register a 20MB, Windows-only application. We do not recommend BuddyShopping.