MySpace has launched an internally developed application called Primetime that is essentially a custom media player providing access to all of Hulu’s video content. The app allows you to embed the player on your personal homepage and profile, and lets you to search Hulu and watch video from within the player.

MySpace previously allowed users to watch some of this content – like Saturday Night Live and 24 – via a special page on the site, but now, users can simply watch whatever they want from their homepage or profile (where there friends can also watch and in turn add the app). Like Hulu, videos will include various forms of advertising like pre and post-roll commercials.

While it’s not surprising that MySpace is moving to make better use of Hulu content – it is after all a joint venture between parent company News Corp and NBC Universal – it does represent a massive opportunity to expand Hulu’s distribution. MySpace is still the world’s second largest social networking site, reaching more than 100 million unique visitors per month.

And while Hulu has shown impressive growth in its first year, many of those 100 million MySpace visitors probably haven’t checked it out yet - that all changes with the Primetime app. Smart move by News Corp to better integrate these two properties.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Hulu on MySpaceTV PrimeTimeMySpace and HarperCollins Hook Up in Hopes that Teens Still Read BooksVeoh Taking Over Prime Time TV?MySpaceTV Signs the BBCMicrosoft Photosynth To Appear On CSI:New YorkHappy Holidays Hulu Style: 2500 InvitesHulu Worked for Video. How About Music?

Source:Mashable!

Popacular, a site that measures popularity of websites according to the number of related tweets, has a huge counter that counts the overall number of tweets. I don’t know how accurate this thing can be, given that it’s third party, but if it is, then we’ve recently surpassed the billionth tweet mark.

This is just another sign of how big Twitter has become. For comparison, Facebook recently announced they host 10 billion photos in their database; however, Facebook is huge and has been around much longer than Twitter. If anyone ever needed a clear sign that Twitter has gone mainstream - however you define it - this milestone is it.

Also, seeing that counter spin amazingly fast makes us sorry for all those times we’ve made fun of Twitter’s engineers for not being able to keep the site up during a traffic rush. Sorry, guys, we understand now.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Current TV to Integrate Twitter into Presidential Debate CoverageTwitter Local - Find Out Who’s Tweeting Near YouTwitter: What’s The Best Business Model?Twitter to Launch Special Site for Tracking the Presidential DebatesTwit.io: And the Twitter Economy Lives OnTwitter Vote Report Will Track Election Day Shadiness (and Long Lines)Twitter + Location Based Feeds = TwitterWhere

Source:Mashable!

This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services.

Unlike most categories in The Open Web Awards, social shopping is comprised largely of companies that sell physical goods (or at least procure them on behalf of their customers). Last year, our people’s choice winner was Zlio, a French company that lets you create your own online stores, while our judge’s choice was Woot, the “deal a day” website with a cult-like following.

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—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Yahoo Divesting in Shopping Site KelkooZlio Partners with Shopping.com in the USStyleFeeder Customizes Shopping.com Search, Joins Glam NetworkMyShape’s Personal Shopper FundedThisNext Gets Another $5M So Social Shopping Can Live OnMyThings Giftlist Tries to Prevent Lame Christmas PresentsOsoyou, Women’s Social Network, Gets $2 Million

A week ago we brought you word of a little website called What Would You Say To The President. And, well, it drew a mixed response. Today there’s another political item to consider, this one coming by way of Kronomy, an interactive timeline utility of the Dipity and AllofMe stripe.

Interested at all in ready-made timelines for the main contenders in this year’s U.S. presidential election campaign? Senators Barack Obama and John McCain have slideshows all their own. And if you want cutting user commentary to go along with this race to November, there’s plenty of of partisan rancor to bathe in whilst you embed your favorite candidate on a webpage of your choosing.

Whether it be on Blogger, TypePad, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster or Xanga, or you want to embed a piece of code manually, sharing is easy, and according to Kronomy it’s already quite popular. Tens of thousands of users have been interacting with the timelines provided. What’s more, there are items allowing you to publish your face aside one politician or the other and spread the support around to friends and anyone who happens to come across your personal graphic. Is this useful? Much less so than the timelines, which are quite well done and worth browsing. Even if you’re just looking to brush up your education of their respective biographies, they’re quite interesting. If you must share a widget with fellow Web users this election season, these are the ones to plug.

Touching once more on the me-and-Barry and me-and-Johnny features, it’s interesting to find in the white space present on both Obama and McCain graphics the circular logo for the Obama for America campaign displayed. A simple gray outline would likely suffice. What do you think?

Barack Obama ´s life path

John McCain ´s life path

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Xakasha Relaunches 3D Timelines as Kronomy: 500 Invites for Mashable ReadersTruveo’s Election Video Site is Sooo Late.Help Catch the Bad Guys with New Widgets from the FBIPoliticians Come To Facebook for Election 2006Amazon Affiliate Widgets!Declare Yourself: MySpace Gets PoliticalYahoo Didn’t Give Up On Its Widget Engine (Yet)

Source:Mashable!

A UK-based social shopping service called Tribesmart recently had its unveiling, and so far it looks like a serious contender in the market. It’s young, so it doesn’t boast an immeasurably large supply of products to wade through, but the foundation for something reasonably big to occur.

Social shopping is a topic we return to with relative frequency here at Mashable. Earlier this month we mentioned a budding service called TurnTo, for example. And one thing that remains among the most necessary elements for a successful startup of this kind is not abundant features, but smart design. Intuitiveness is key. And in that respect, Tribesmart delivers.

Yes, you’ll probably become very quickly familiar with the way it operates. The site layout is fairly traditional, with few surprises, as you’ll immediately notice. Yet at the same time everything seems in the right place, and it’s all pieced together very attractively. Granted, it’s pretty sparse next to the gigantor that is Amazon, but what it does show it shows well. (Bad phrasing? It’ll have to do.)

I can’t really emphasize the utility of Tribesmart enough. Take the presentation of the homepage, for instance. Whereas some services might relegate product tags to some region around the bottom half of a page, Tribesmart positions it in the top left of the page. This fits nicely against the main menu and its submenus situated along the top of the window. It invites the user to look around as one would a new store. You might know what you’re searching for at Amazon the moment you arrive, but if you prefer an extra bit of spontaneity, Tribesmart does you that favor.

You can do a number of things besides browse products, of course. Write reviews, assemble personal lists to share, maybe. If you bring a group of friends along through the registration process, which takes only seconds to do, or alternatively find new contacts through the service, you can assemble tribes to discuss various things in the consumer realm. That’s where the social side of the equation really kicks in. For things in the land of technology - gadgetry in particular - groupthink is natural. It happens in places like Engadget and Gizmodo. Now Tribesmart, too. There’s even a chat window nestled along the bottom of the page, Facebook-style. However, this one is far less complex, and easy to ignore. If you don’t want to trouble with such a thing, well, you’ll hardly notice its there.

Getting back to the core shopping and sharing elements, Tribesmart presents users with tools to add to Firefox and Internet Explorer 5, 6, 7, and the 8 beta browser. Which are supremely useful as they allow users to quickly add just about anything one might want to highlight. Like iPods. Or digital cameras. Or summer garden sheds. Yes, sheds. The kind of contraptions that run homeowners thousands of dollars/pounds.

The number of users interested in huge and costly products is presumably very small, even taking into account the potential for a great number of registrants to climb aboard Tribesmart in the coming weeks and months. But the choice is yours as to what you add to the Tribesmart product roll, and that’s something to appreciate. Powerful aggregation in an elegant setup is a rarity. Now Web users in the UK can partake in the process.

People often speak of old and new media as a dichotomy, with stodgy network television channels and traditional newspapers on the one hand, and hip, technologically sophisticated youth on the other. But recently, old media –- in particular, large television outlets -– have been catching on. A recent post on Mashable noted that CNN is using Twitter to interact with viewers. I commented that Fox News Channel is also using Twitter and Facebook. Many traditional newspapers, national and local, are also using Twitter and other social software to various degrees.

Because I use my Comcast Cable DVR to watch shows on delay about 75% of the time, I found myself this morning viewing a national news show and realizing that I couldn’t interact with the hosts via Twitter, because I was an hour too late. Show hosts asking viewers to “Twitter your comments” is clearly the modern version of “calling in with your questions for our guest.” The key question I asked myself was, as more television media master their new media brands, will we find ourselves more likely to tune into their shows in real time?

The financial consequence of not using DVRs, or downloading the shows from a third-party website, or other new options, is that more people watching the real-time version means more viewer share, which in turn means more advertising revenue. People are more likely to engage the show in real time and therefore more likely to see traditional commercials. I don’t know if the gurus at television networks or advertising firms they work with are thinking about it this way yet, but it seems like a truism to me.

So what might be a strategy going forward? As an avid watcher of television, particularly political news, complex dramas, and reality shows, I could imagine many scenarios in which incentives are created to watch shows in real time – viewers pose questions for the guest, guide alternative dramatic scenes, or decide what challenge the players have to perform. How cool would it be to watch Donald Trump, Sr. using Twitter on a BlackBerry in the middle of the live Apprentice finale? And the advertising underbelly is that you are statistically more likely to purchase paper towels, basketball sneakers, or a dream vacation cruise.

With the increasingly “long tail” of niche television channels, magazines, and similar outlets only becoming more prevalent, it might behoove the “blockbuster” organizations like NBC to become the leaders in “old new media” to win some of that viewer share back. This summer, the startup social network and search site Searchles inked a deal with the venerable Washington Post to create social networks among people with common reading interests. Why not similarly network all the people who voted for Clay Aiken, are fans of Gossip Girl, or hate The View?

Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy in Washington, DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Federal Government.

(Image via Flickr/ dailyinvention)

—Related Articles at Mashable - All That’s New on the Web:Pudding Media Raises $8 Million to Place Ads in Phone Calls. Yuck.TVTonic Launches Auto-Sync Videos On DemandGoogle TV Screws the Middleman (i.e. Apple)Save the Date for the New Communications Forum 2008Mashable Readers: Save 20% for O’Reilly Money:Tech Conference in NYCBrightcove Launches in UK with London OfficeSpactor Speech Technology Searches Radio & TV

Source:Mashable!

One of many companies launching at DEMO this week is Say Where from DialDirections. Say Where hopes to make its mark by offering voice input locations and directions generated by speaking an address or city into an iPhone 3G. By doing this Say Where brings basic pre-programmed GPS destination functionality to the iPhone 3G.

If you have used any basic GPS system, you know that pre-programmed destinations are par for the course. There is a selection included in any GPS worth its salt of nearby gas stations, movie theaters, restaurants and other points of interest. The drawback to these is that they don’t change dynamically as businesses succeed or fail. They could be outdated at any moment without real time data feedback.

If you have an iPhone, you already have all of the real time Web-based destination information you could want. Coupled with the ability to get directions and mark your place with drop pin and bookmark, iPhone users already have more flexibility than this program appears to offer at first blush. If I had to choose between getting more reliable and up to date information from the iPhone Web interface, or possibly outdated pre-programmed information from Say Where, I’m going to have to choose the Internet until Say Where includes real data.

One of Say Where’s pitch points is voice capability. It’s nice to speak into the iPhone and get results, especially if you have trouble with the touch screen keyboarding. in the end, what good is convenience or cool software if it gives you potentially useless data? This is a good idea, but it needs more.

Perhaps I am judging this application too quickly and should be more excited about having access to data like nearby destinations, points of interest, recommendations and reviews with simple voice commands. Unfortunately, I just can’t seem to get excited about it. If it offered a way to get real time data and merge it with true GPS functionality, I’d be more excited. however, with the availability of the DASH GPS, I’m not seeing a need for Say Where right now, since DASH already does pretty much everything that I want in a real time, Internet connected GPS interface.

However, if the most you can say about your new iPhone App is that it uses voice commands and won’t cost users a phone call when retrieving the data they request, I’d recommend adding more features to really make it noteworthy. As it stands, when I want unbiased data on the iPhone 3G from voice commands I’ll just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 and either get the answer on the phone or have them SMS me. If I want similar functionality I can use programs like Nearby or Infospace. Meanwhile, if Say Where were to introduce real data instead of canned data, it would become ten times more useful.

Source:Mashable!

The objective for TurnTo, a New York-based startup introduced at DEMOfall 08 this week, is to enable your personalized Web browsing experience to supersede website borders. TurnTo’s intention is to spread itself to an ever-expanding set of partner sites. And that’s important to emphasize. Because anything short of something of popular or viral design will sweep TurnTo into irrelevance.

The concept is interesting. It’s been done before in various other forms; social shopping is something that has been around for many months already. Yet, Turnto’s implementation is light. Very light. The widget is quite nondescript. Nothing to install whatsoever. You just sign up, connect with your friends, and start browsing.

That second step, though, is a major one. The biggest hurdle of all. This goes as much for end users as for websites, too. Users need to engage people they know through invitations, which is rarely a fun process to trudge though. (The company lists LinkedIn, AOL Mail, Gmail, MSN/Hotmail, Yahoo Mail/Rocketmail, and .Mac as import options.) Oppositely, TurnTo lists sites such as Angara, Compsource, Teavana, and EarthWatch as participants in the launch. As you will immediately recognize, the starter group is infinitesimally small when sized up against the full spectrum of destinations it might inhabit in widget form. It will have to grow. A lot. (TurnTo tells Mashable that four more are under implementation, including three Internet retail 500 sites.)

Leaving aside the obstacles for adoption for a moment, once you do establish connections, it’s very simple to operate. Say you’re really into tea. Maybe you’re an artisan with herbs and leaves and spices and things. And your friends are, too. In that case, if you were to trek over to Teavana, you could share recommendations or learn from others about things they found appealing. This at once gives you a social element to your shopping experience in a particular spot on the Web. And it allows websites to provide that service without having to expend much effort in shaping their pages to cater to such demand, if it indeed exists amongst friends.

Again, TurnTo has a phenomenal task ahead if it is to make any sort of lasting impact - aside from very particular shoppers who aren’t eager to browse dozens, or even hundreds of websites in a given period of time. There’s no downplaying the significance of the scale of what TurnTo must achieve. Sure, if you’re a fan of Teavana, for instance, there you have it. You’re set. Mission complete. Realistically though, in order that TurnTo make its business a viable one (revenue is dependent on a purchase performance model), its grand dream needs to be substantiated to at least partial degree. It couldn’t sensibly have it all, of course. But it might gather enough steam. It’s a possibility.

A handful of startups are groping around in the “social shopping” area, talking about making money from the 80% of online shopping time that is spent researching products rather than buying them.The king of this space is CNET reviews, which combines editor reviews with lots of pictures and structured data with direct user reviews as well. In May Yahoo launched Yahoo Tech, directly targeting CNET Reviews as well. When I research products, I usually don’t go much further than these two sites (although I spend a lot of time on the gadget blogs trying to find out exactly what new stuff I intend to research). Of course, CNET and Yahoo Tech focus solely on technology gadgets.

Other services have launched in this space as well, generally focusing on wish lists, recommendation lists or both, and often giving users tools to put widgets with recommended or desired products up on their blogs or websites. See our posts on Kaboodle, Stylehive, Yahoo Shoposphere and MyPickList. Wists is another site in this category, although we have not written about it yet. These sites expand well beyond technology in their product reviews.

These sites generate revenue from affiliate fees (via links to ecommerce sites) and/or via contextual advertising placed on the site, usually Google.

And now comes ThisNext, a Los Angeled based company with a NYT writeup as well as a thumbs up from Jason Calacanis (Jason used to work with the CEO, which may explain his mention of the product).

The site is the best I’ve seen so far, with clearly structured items and very easy ways for users to add their own opinion via comments, tagging, comment ratings and adding things to a wishlist. There are easy to find “buy” links if you want to purchase the item. Users can also create a website widget to show off the stuff they really like. Good stuff, well executed.

But I have never gotten that excited about sites like ThisNext and the others mentioned above. I don’t believe they will ever succeed in drawing customers away from big Internet brands like CNET and Yahoo, who are already doing a very good job of integrating user reviews with editorial reviews and content.

Neither the NYT or Jason mention that CNET is already out there and dominates this space for tech products. The NYT should have…writer Bob Tedeschi clearly intended to give ThisNext a positive review (complete with a picture of the CEO walking with a surfboard) but he never seems to be able to put his finger on why it’s so great.

Jason, however, nails it. He thinks ThisNext can be successful because it will show emerging trends in what consumers like.

It’s sort of like taking “The Tipping Point” concepts and making them into a product you can actually use. For example, as the community grows you’ll be able to see who recommended a product first. After some period of time you might be able to find the people who are good at finding–or creating–trends.

CNET doesn’t do this, they simply review products and put their reviews up on the site. They do not show how certain products become hot over time, and what people are good at picking winners.

This type of thing might find a niche - it won’t displace blogs that are dedicated to talking about the newest and greatest products in a given space, and they won’t displace the big review sites like CNET for people who want to find reviews on a product they already know about. But perhaps they can serve people who want to be a part of a community that decides what products are hot and which are not.

Am I excited? No. But I’m intruiged enough to write about this at 3:30 in the morning. Or maybe I’m not excited because it’s 3:30 in the morning. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.

TechAddress’ Coverage found here.

The ads, some of them very explicit, can be found in the “casual encounters” area of the personals section, behind a warning notice designed to deter children or the easily offended.

Hide and seek

In early September Jason Fortuny, a web designer and network administrator from Seattle, took an apparently real ad from one Craigslist site and posted it in the Seattle “casual encounters” section. The advert was from a woman looking for a man.

Within a day he had 178 responses, many with photos. At which point he posted them all onto a public website, complete with the photos, e-mail and IM addresses and even mobile phone numbers.He has since asked people to help him identify those respondents who were more cautious about revealing themselves in their e-mails, presumably so he can humiliate them further online.Some of the men who contacted Fortuny were married. Some used their work e-mail addresses or attached nude photos of themselves. Many of them said things that they would not want friends, family, co-workers or even casual acquaintances to know, and all of that information is now available on a public, and widely publicised, website.

Fortuny calls his exploit “The Craigslist Experiment”, but of course it is not an “experiment” at all since it has long been clear to anyone who cares to think about it that few net users have any real understanding of the degree to which they expose themselves when they go online.

Privacy row

The recent furore over AOL’s ill-considered release of the search terms entered by its customers, and the ease with which people could be tracked down just by what they were looking for, showed this clearly.

All Fortuny has done is show how far things can go, and in the process he has probably ruined the lives of dozens of people.

Some of them will probably sue him, since although the US has no real privacy law “publication of non-newsworthy, private facts about an individual that would be highly offensive to a reasonable person” is grounds for legal action. Some may be planning more direct action against him.

Wired News blogger Ryan Singel has called him “sociopathic”, and although some of those commenting on Fortuny’s blog think what he has done is “cool” in some way, the general feeling is that he has gone too far.

I agree. He has acted in a despicable manner, and deserves whatever legal action is coming his way. He also deserves to be ostracised by the online communities he was so clearly seeking to impress.We didn’t need to know about his experiment to understand that the net creates new possibilities for public exposure. And we certainly don’t need to give Fortuny credit for his cheap trick.

After all, this was the week in which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised publicly for messing with his users’ privacy and getting it wrong at the massively popular social networking site he created.

The problems arose when a recent site overhaul introduced a “news feed” feature which instantly notified users when anything changed in their contacts’ profiles, including when they made new friends, joined or left groups or changed relationship status.

The user community, mostly US college students, didn’t like this at all since while all the information that was visible in the feed had been available to anyone who cared to look for it, bringing it into one place left them feeling exposed.

As a result of the protests Facebook has made some changes, giving users more control over what information other people can see in their feeds, and this may be enough to defuse the criticism.

And the incident has done a lot more to raise general awareness of online privacy, at far less cost, than Fortuny’s exploits.

Life lesson

Privacy breaches occur all the time, of course. Sometimes it is malice, sometimes it is poor decision making, and sometimes it’s incompetence.

Over the weekend Linden Lab, creators of the popular and increasingly hip virtual world Second Life, revealed that its account database had been compromised and details of more than 600,000 accounts were exposed.

Account names, real names and contact details, but not credit card information, were all visible.

And the net’s not the only place where personal details can leak out.

The board of Hewlett-Packard is still coping with the revelation that old-fashioned surveillance methods were used by chairwoman Patricia Dunn, who used private investigators to get phone records for her fellow board members and a number of journalists after details of internal discussions appeared in the press.

In the end the question is one of trust, and of understanding what levels of trust are appropriate in different areas of our lives, on and offline. Sadly, however, the answer seems to be that anyone using the network should trust no one.

An e-mail sent to a girlfriend or boyfriend may be circulated widely if the relationship breaks up; a seemingly trustworthy company may have bad internal practices and expose you to identity theft; the person you think you’re chatting to on IM could be an impostor or even your colleague’s young child - ask my friend Simon about this one.But we cannot live in such a world and we should not have to. As society developed from small groups where everyone was known to everyone else we found new ways to make connections and establish appropriate levels of trust.

We’ll need to work hard, and fast, to find ways to make online contacts work too. Otherwise we’ll fall for scam after scam and expose ourselves to humiliation or blackmail again and again.

And we’ll fall for the oldest tricks in the book, like those who wanted to believe in YouTube icon Lonelygirl15, who claimed to be a precociously astute home-schooled sixteen year-old in her posted videos and turns out to be an “art project” with links to Hollywood.

While the deceit may get someone a production deal or a show on an obscure cable channel, it shows yet again that you simply can’t believe what you read or see online without some real evidence.
Bill Thompson is a regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/5335054.stm

Published: 2006/09/11 12:41:48 GMT

FOR most small businesses, competing on the Web is hardly easier than competing offline, where gigantic retailers with huge marketing budgets dominate. But for Amenity Home, a start-up in Los Angeles with three products, four employees and no marketing budget, getting noticed was a simple matter of word-of-mouth advertising, albeit in an unusual way.

Late last month, an online shopper posted a photo of one of Amenity Home’s $400 duvet covers on ThisNext.com, one of a new breed of Web sites that promises to connect independent-minded shoppers with hard-to-find products. Other shoppers copied the photo to their own blog pages, bringing the company some much-welcome attention, said Kristina de Corpo, an Amenity Home founder.

“We’re a young business furiously trying to keep our heads above water, so this is really exciting,” she said. “We’ve gotten tons of hits from it.”

Sites like ThisNext and a handful of services like Kaboodle.com, Wists.com and StyleHive.com are spearheading a new category of e-commerce called “social shopping,” that tries to combine two favorite online activities: shopping and social networking. These sites are hoping to ride the MySpace wave by gathering people in one place to swap shopping ideas. And like MySpace, the sites are designed for both browsing and blogging, with some shopping-related technology twists included.

Social shopping is just the latest solution to a chronic problem for online retailers and shoppers: many shoppers aren’t sure what to buy, but they know they won’t find it on the sites of mainstream retailers like Macy’s, Amazon or Wal-Mart.

Online retailers often refer to this as the “product discovery” problem, but it might better be referred to as online retailing’s Teflon piñata, so many times have entrepreneurs tried to crack it.

“Online shopping is more accurately described as purchasing, because it’s so directed and goal-specific,” said Gordon Gould, ThisNext’s chief executive. “You might be looking for a plasma screen TV, but there’s not a lot of lateral thinking about what else you might be interested in. We want to show people other products that wouldn’t make sense for an e-tailer to batch together.”

•Users who register with social shopping services typically create their own pages to collect information on items they find. But instead of simply describing what they have found on other sites and posting a Web address, they can download a piece of software that allows them to grab images of those products to post on their own shopping lists.

The social shopping services can then post pictures of items that have been viewed or circulated widely among visitors who have searched the site for, say, home furnishing ideas.

The social shopping sites hope to parlay that enthusiasm into advertising revenue, once they attract enough visitors to go back to merchants with a better sales pitch. Some sites, like ThisNext, also plan to form so-called affiliate relationships with merchants, who often pay percent commissions on sales that come as a result of their products being featured on other sites.

ThisNext also gives users the ability to transfer pictures or videos of their favorite products from the site to their personal blog pages. Mr. Gould said the site could also eventually make money by helping companies find influential customers that they might involve in early-stage marketing plans or product testing, among other things.

“If you’re the go-to guy for buying Kona coffee, I want to find you, not a generalist,” he said.

Kaboodle, meanwhile, has created another revenue source by striking a deal late last month with eBay’s comparison shopping service, Shopping.com. Under that agreement, whenever a Kaboodle user features a product that also appears on the Shopping.com database, Kaboodle will post the prices at which the product is sold online at various merchants. Should a reader click through to the merchant’s site, Kaboodle will earn a share of the fee the merchant pays Shopping.com for that click.

Kaboodle has also worked with eBay to create pages for collectors of certain items on Kaboodle, wherein they can receive feeds of eBay auctions that are relevant to their collections.

The site, which has about 50,000 register