What is it all about?

‘Things I desire’ is a website where user can list their favorite products they encounter on the daily web journeys. It doesn’t matter if it is something he/she would like to receive or if it is something the user would like to give away. ‘Things I desire’ only lists the added article in a del.icio.us manner to provide the visitors only with the necessary information. It is not big, fancy, full of advertising, selling centered, company directed. It is a little ajaxy sticky, all time present, usable for grandpas and sisters, fast, shareable, social and completely user-centered.
The focus of this WebApp is its existence in the background. It is not like a Webmail Application where the user has always one browser window in use to simply keep the App running.
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Add item

To add an item to ‘Things I desire’ people can do this manually through some formfields inside their for free account. Or they can use a bookmarklet similar to the “post to del.icio.us” link. If a user finds a product he/she likes and would like to put on his/her list, he/she clicks on this bookmarklet and will be redirected to the ‘Things I desire’ add item page. This page analyzes the previous product site and tries to guess as much information as it can. The adding process needs to be fast and non distracting. The web is already full of distraction and ‘Things I desire’ should try to make a difference here. Here is a wireframe to get an idea of what I am talking about:

Productname: The ‘Things I desire’ system should analyze the product website and look for headlines. These headlines are suggested towards the user and he/she can instantly pick one from the suggested list. If the provided headlines does not make sense he/she can enter one manually as well.
Rating: Our associative way of thinking is always about relations. I like this more than that, this is better than the one I saw yesterday, …. To allow the user to set these relations he/she can add a rating for it on how much he/she likes this product. One star does not mean it is bad product, it just means that the user liked it but does not really desire it, while five stars means a must-have.
Description: This formfield allows the user to assign even more associative information towards the listed product. The users could add things like ‘I got this link from John’ or ‘I finally found it’ and so on. But there is also the possibility to grab a simple product description from the previous product site. Maybe a little popUp could open up, listing all text from the product site in little boxes and the user selects the appropriate box.
This item is for: These two radiobuttons simply direct the product into the right list. Every user has a wishlist for its own and for his/her friends to adress the common panic right before birthday announcements or Christmas.
Images: This works similar to the productname thing. ‘Things I desire’ takes all images from the previous site and lists them there. The user selects one and this image is going to be displayed on the overview list to make browsing and searching for items easier. If the system can not fetch an image from the products site than the user can select a generic one, where its illustrations are in line with the common product categories. All images are stored on the ‘Things I desire’ server to avoid linking and updating issues. Of course the copyright is still by the owner of the images.
Categories: It has not been added on the wireframe yet since I am not so sure about it. There could also be a system of assigning a category for each product. These could be ‘Friends only’, ‘Xmas list’, …. The assigning of these could work similar to the del.icio.us tagging suggestions. The point I have with these categories is that they are making the system instantly more complex and all of the sudden the user has to make a decision about placing something somewhere. I would like to avoid these kind of decision and let the information be structured in a flat list to make the system as non distracting as possible.
The adding process is monitored by the system. If Person A added the product already and chose Headline3 and Image4 than these are going to be the default values for the Person B who is adding the product right now.
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Overview list

This page simply shows the simple list of added products. Here is a wireframe again:

On the top the user can switch between his/her own list and the givaway lists. The icons on the top right are for adjusting the view inside the list (single long list or two column layout) The right side shows a list of his/her friends. It might happen that I can’t remember the list from Anna but I know that Amy has Anna on her list. It is again reasoned in our associative way of thinking. For each item the list shows the desired image and the chosen headline. Besides the description text, rating and Added date there is also the del.icio.us sharing feature to provide a more social approach. ‘I really like these cool japanese shirts. Let’s see who likes them as well’.
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Issues

I have currently two issues in mind which needs to be solved somehow:
Flash: What happens if a product website is made in flash. The information can not be retrieved automatically but more importantly there is no direct linking possibility. The only solution I can think of right now is to add a clickable sticky on the ‘add item’ page saying ‘We could not retrieve the data. Click here to open up the website inside a popup and follow the on screen description to add a path to the product’ When the user clicks on the link, a pop up opens up containing two frames. In frame one the website is displayed and in frame two a list of formfields connected by arrows is provided. The user can then write down the necessary menu items to find the product.
If grandma is clicking on the Florians wishlist and the product is presented on a flashwebsite, the website is going to open up together with a pop up displaying the path Florian has entered before.
This is a pretty distracting thing but I am not aware of a smarter solution right now.
Patent: I am not quite sure if it is going to be problem but I have somehow in mind that the wishlist itself is being a patent of amazon.
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What else?

API: API is probably the wrong word for it but it could be sweet to offer somehow tipps and guidelines on how to change the sourcecode of a shopsystem to make the retrieving of information to ‘Things I desire’ more easy and successful. Small shops could use this wishlist site as a wordofmouth advertising system.
Button: Besides a ‘Buy now’ button on some companies website there could also be an add to ‘I desire’ button. These shops would get the amazon feature and could make sure that the product is bought on their website and not on a different one.
Print: I would like to see the possibiltiy to print out a selection of this wishlist. I could see that in the form of a pdf as well as real paper. The shopping tours of parents are always paper centric and thus it could help them finding what they need.
Import amazon list: This could be a handy thing.
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Money, Money, Money

Affiliate: ‘Things I desire’ could become a member of all big shopping affiliate programs and thus make money when users buy things using the ‘Things I desire’ system.
Commercial maps: I am not quite sure if I like the idea or not but it could be probably pretty easy to draw maps about the users product list. People who have an iPod on their list will most likely also have a nintendo DS in their box. This information might be quite interesting to companies and I am not quite sure if you could sell such statics to them. Maybe offering a subscription to a graph generator frontend or something like this. Dunno about the users privacy issue here.
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