I stumbled upon an interesting site today: Wantz.it
It’s a wish list type of site that does its thing in a completely different manner than most other sites in that genre (WhatIWantMost included). I’ve become a bit knowledgeable in that area over the past year. Most of the sites are similar, some have better and/or cooler features than others. Rather than fit in with the rest of the crowd, trying to build a community around the wish list, Wantz.it does the opposite. It does nothing but display your wish list. The most peculiar thing is that it doesn’t allow you to add items to your list on their site in any manner. Instead it does something really clever. It builds your wish list using specially tagged bookmarks from your del.icio.us account. All you have to do is tag a bookmark with “dowant” and it is picked up by the Wantz.it site.
Because del.icio.us makes use of a pretty simple url structure it is easy to find those tagged items. In my case they would be:
Page: http://del.icio.us/diggerdanh/dowant
RSS Feed: http://del.icio.us/rss/diggerdanh/dowant
All Wantz.it has to do is get the RSS feed, parse it and display the bookmarks on their wish list page.
This led me to wonder in what other ways the del.icio.us bookmarking and tagging system could be used by other applications. [Edit note: a couple of original stupid ideas removed] My thinking cap isn’t really working too well right now. Actually, I’ve just come up with one, but it is not a very “good” one - coordinating DoS attacks. Eww, yuck, another bad one - bookmarking comment forms (or other submission forms) that fit a specific signature for use by spam submittal software. Okay, I’ll move on - I don’t like my mind being in the gutter.
My second thought about the site is that the domain name is awesome. Wantz.it itself is pretty cool, but the member pages end up looking like danhounshell.wantz.it. How cool and easy to remember is that?!?! Okay, it’s no syn.dicate.us, but it’s still pretty cool. :)