The approach for new startup Kaboodle is pretty straightforward: surf around the web shopping and comparing prices and aggregating this content on a single page. By clicking on a link in your browser toolbar area and adding these various pages to a master kaboodle page with a long, somewhat cryptic URL which can be made public or private.

I decided to whip up a quick page on the Xbox 360 that almost everybody knows will be released on Tuesday November 22. I was particularly curious who was showing prices. EB Games says they are already sold out. I also clicked added links for Xbox 360 related accessories to this page.

Some additional notes/thoughts
- I keep wanting to write kanoodle.com which is an already established search engine powered by Inktomi. This could be a naming problem and potentially present a legal challenge. Is that part of the marketing? If it is, I’d say that was poorly thought out.
- No RSS feeds or OPML for pages created
- No ability to tag individual items or pages, although a short description can be added
- Some folks are commenting that it is also similar to Wists which describes itself as: “… a free service designed to make it super easy to mine the web for its hidden treasures and store lists of links to them in a personal, online image gallery scrapbook”
- It is also similar to clipmarks, though clipmarks allows tagging of items.
- when you click on a page to add results, kaboodle attempts to extract the important information
- the revenue model is based upon contextual ads but the context shown for the xbox 360 are badly off. Lasik surgery? MP3 player showdown? What do these have to do with Xbox and gaming? I kept refreshing hoping to get more contextually relevant ads. Perhaps these are just placeholder ads? They all point to kaboodle.com so they appear to be doing their own thing. Lots of work to do here.

Others talking about Kaboodle
Om Malik is concerned that the big three will imitate Kaboodle’s functionality:

… the biggest fear I have is that it can be easily imitated by the big three - Yahoo, Google and MSN. eBay might find it useful to offer it as an enhancement to its users. It will be interesting to see if the three co-founders can turn this nifty feature into a lasting commercial entity.

Techcrunch categorizes Kaboodle as bookmarking + wiki, pointing out that this is the result of $1.5 million in angel funding (seriously?) and adds: “I’d also like to see tagging functionality added to pages and individual pieces of content.”
The Business2Business Blog points out the big hurdle for Kaboodle: ” If enough people start using it, Kaboodle could create a user-generated shopping engine that is much better than the automated ones like Froogle and Shoppping.com.”

That’s the big “if” for any web service, isn’t it? Will people actually use it? Will you?

There are more reasons why I would not use this then would.

Update 10/27/05 2:58am PST: Kaboodle is hotlinking images, too. Baaad, especially consider they are sourcing and resizing full size pics from the source. Why not just cache with their own resized copy? Thumbnail pictures aren’t copyrighted, that’s already been proved out in court (Google images), but using the full image from another site without permission is a major no-no.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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