Shoplette: Twitter Meets Shopping

When I first read from Singapore Entrepreneurs about this new startup called Shoplette, I was like, “geez, not again… not another social networking site.” However, after visiting this newest startup from Mobrick, I realize that this startup actually has some legs.

Yes, there are quite a few social shopping sites today, but while most sites today focus on building a community around online shopping, Shoplette wisely remembers that shopping is one activity that most people still prefer to do by physically visiting a store, instead of clicking away in their bedroom and awaiting the product to arrive in the mail.

Thus, instead of trying to act as a recommendation and review network to find the lowest possible online prices, Shoplette actually emphasizes on gathering information on which store the product was purchased, as well as the cost and other information like discounts and stuff. A nice Google Maps mashup shows you the physical location of the store as well.

As a social network, Shoplette’s simple user interface looks a lot like Twitter, with a concept of friends and followers as well as using tags to organize everything. Shoplette also lets you create wish lists, which is pretty much a standard and indispensable feature for social shopping websites nowadays.

A few more reasons why I feel Shoplette will go far:

I hate walled gardens, and to its credit, Shoplette pretty much leaves all of its data in the open for the public to consume. Even though I didn’t sign up for an account, most of the important product and shopper information is still readily available for me to see.
The Post by MMS feature is pretty killer, and Shoplette correctly understands that most people do not go shopping with a digital camera.
There is great advertising and monetization potential for this service. Unlike other sites which caters for online shopping only, Shoplette can tap onto the much bigger pool of brick-and-mortar retailers and provide them a cost-effective and targeted way to do promotions, advertising and product placement.

And finally, here are a few things I think still needs to be done for Shoplette to take the next step:

RSS Support - I was quite shocked when I didn’t see a single RSS feed on Shoplette. This is a non-negotiable feature for any Web 2.0 site created in 2008. Data portability is the next big thing, and you need to be able to get all those public feeds, product feeds, friend feeds, shopper feeds and what not into RSS so they can be consumed and remixed within other services like FriendFeed or whatever. This should be priority #1
Intelligent Tagging - Using tagging to categorize products is a good idea, but can easily become unmanageable as data accumulates. The system should be able to at least help users auto-fill the tag field when they are creating a new product, or better yet, be smart enough to automatically consolidate tags and understand that CD == cds == cd.

Update: Hey, I just realized that one of the founders of Shoplette, Shannon Low, is one of my childhood friends! Great Job, Shannon!