Web 2.0 Stores > Fast, Simple, Search Engine Friendly Ecommerce

The Santa Clara-based social shopping site Kaboodle is due to announce some major news at midnight EST. The first announcement is that they’re partnering with Shopping.com, who will supply their entire product catalogue to Kaboodle. The move will expand Kaboodle’s product listings to millions of items from thousands of merchants, and they’re leveraging Shopping.com’s API to make the magic happen. But the more interesting news is that they’re getting into the widget game. Once the site goes back online (it’s down for maintenance at the moment), you’ll be able to arrange a collection of your Kaboodle items into a collage, then convert it into a Flash widget for MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, blogs and websites. The widget will also allow other users to contribute items to the collection. What’s more, they’re launching Flash slideshows for MySpace and blogs, and new ways to view your Kaboodle content - either as an itinerary or a grid. One final addition: they’re launching Kaboodle Groups, which will allow multiple users to collaborate on a collection of items, complete with voting and commenting. The launch of widgets makes Kaboodle directly competitive with MyPickList, the product recommendation service from Sprout Commerce. Sprout also have a purely widget-based product that targets social networks more specifically - FavoriteThingz. Similar services include RightCart, an online store widget for your blog sidebar, and the French product recommendation service Zlio, which is expected to release an English version at some point. Meanwhile, CrowdStorm’s social network for shopping will include so-called MySpace codes when the public beta becomes available. Following so soon after the eBay deal, Kaboodle seems to be on a roll - I can only imagine that they’re headed for acquisition further down the road.

I’ve just finished some final touches on FilteringTable, SortableTable’s big (I mean BIG) brother…complete with multiple column sorting, much cleaner data access, the ability to filter, sorting in place, data binding to a simple JSON-based data store… There’s a lot there, so for now I’ll point you to the tests in the nightlies. Current feature list:

• Multiple Column Sorting (number of columns settable, default is 1
• Sorting in place (non-destructive)
• Per-column programmatic filtering
• Add and remove rows on the fly
• Update field values (with typing) on the fly
• No restrictions on sorting on markup

…I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Behind all of this is a simple DataStore object, which the FilteringTable is bound to; all of your updates are made to the store, and the FilteringTable will update automatically. This data store is based on an array of JSON objects, and each object in this array can be complex–and you can use the results of methods to display data in the FilteringTable! This widget was designed to replace SortableTable; if you are working off nightly builds, I suggest you try this out, and give it a spin, and see how you like it.