It’s September and supermarkets are rolling out their Christmas goods: gingerbread, stollen, cookies, and more. Ridiculous, isn’t it? What’s even more ridiculous is that some of these delicacies will expire before Christmas. Anyways, maybe this is a good time to think about presents and collect ideas both for what you would like to receive and what you could possibly buy as a gift for others.
Kaboodle is a handy tool that can help you save and remember items you found online, organize them in lists, which in turn can be made public and shared with others. More generally it can also be used to collect information, but there may be better tools available for this task.
Nicely hidden at the very bottom of every page is the option to “Get the Buttons “. What they mean is “Get the Extension”, which at this point is available for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. I’ll focus on the Firefox extension here.
Once the extension is installed and Firefox is restarted, you can enable the Kaboodle Toolbar. Right-click into an empty spot of any toolbar in Firefox and set a checkmark in front of the “Kaboodle Toolbar”.
Instead of activating the whole toolbar, you can also take the single buttons and place them wherever you like. Right-click into an empty spot of any toolbar in Firefox and select “Customize” from the menu. Then drag and drop the Kaboodle buttons into a desired location, for example on the Navigation toolbar.
Now that your browser is Kaboodle compatible, you can add items with the click of a button. This will work on any website. When you click “Add to Kaboodle” or the respective button, the extension will extract information and open a menu that lets you fix the details or add more information manually. If the spontaneous extraction doesn’t look right, click “fix details” at the bottom and you will be able to select another image, define your own, enter a custom title, change the description and add highlights.
Clicking “Submit” will of course add the item to the list you picked and it will take you right back to the original website.
Back in Kaboodle you can do a lot more than just manage your items and lists. There is a whole network available through which users can share their lists, recommendations or ideas. You can add friends, join groups, follow specific brands, and much more.
Personally, I have decided to keep it simple and am maintaining only three lists: ‘gathered’, ‘wish list’ and ‘gift list’.
Talking about gifts and wishlists brings to my head a couple of other MakeUseOf articles.
- Need a Personal Shopper? Amazon Watcher does the Work for You
- Go Gift Shopping with Amazon Gift Central
Where are you keeping your wish list and how do you acquire gift ideas?
(By) Tina is a regular MUO author. In her offline life she's a PhD student interested in unraveling signaling events that determine cartilage and bone development.
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Filed Under: Cool Websites
Tags: firefox tips, gifts, wishlist
Wish I had seen this yesterday!! =( I was looking for a site to create a wish list on! I finally decided to go with Amazon since they have the bookmarklet where you can add anything from any site to your wish list. I might still try this out though I don’t like toolbars.
Thanks for the comment ChaCha!
For Kaboodle you don’t have to use their toolbar. You can just drag and drop the buttons (from the customize buttons window) to wherever you like on an existing toolbar, like the navigation bar. That’s in Firefox of course.
They also have a walkthrough for IE and Safari.
what sort of things are on your gathered list? the other two are self explanatory, but i’m not sure what a gathered list would be? just curious!
thanks!
The gathered list can be used to store items you have already purchased but want to keep track of.
Great article!
I like using wish list websites for another use as well that may not be as obvious. When I am planning a large purchase, such as a laptop, I set up a new list for the comparisons.
This way I can keep all the information on one page and compare different stores (online and offline), keeping track of which place offers which model at which price. Before I use to surf different sites and have loads of windows open, now I can see it all on one page and even add notes to remind myself of pros and cons.