ThisNext, recently received another 5M in a series B round…

Shopcasting has gotten a bad rap for being poorly named on a few blogs and comments, but I think its a smart term. The end customer of this product is a shopper who does not speak “widget”, but instead needs a fashionable term. Besides podcasting is proven so why not ride that wave.

Also, impressive management background.

Future features:
1)shopcasting my favorite members’ picks, shopcasting my wishlist (I was told this was coming).

2)Embedding a ChaCha/Quno like Q&A service where I broadcast what I am looking for to all reviewers I have tagged as my favorite reviewers. There could be monetization in this scenario / premium account. This fixed the “apartmenttherapy” complex…Apartment Therapy is a great blog suggesting cool products, but communication/recommendations across the readership is limited to desolate comments on blog posts.

When I said I disagreed, I was referencing Ted, Bryan, et al’s comments about people not being motivated to make product recommendations. Blogging has shown that people go to great lengths to simply express themselves to a peer group that is relevant to them. While it is true, we want to make it as simple as possible to get recommendations in, we also want people to have to do some thinkning about what they submit otherwise garbage in/garbage out.

And your point is well-taken about Amazon, Google, etc. We need to be nimble, focused on areas where they are weak or do not compete, and look for ways to align interests.

Lastly, I must be a good BS-er as you are right, ThisNext def could not afford to buy the NY Times. ;-). More seriously, the underlying story around the smart social shopping plays is really the revolution of brand marketing online. That is a HUGE story for much of the business world.

ThisNext and Kaboodle, in particular, solve the problem of making the most current and expert product information easily accessible by creating platforms where knowledgable people - frequently more expert than the professional reviewers - can put their thoughts and prove their credibility. This is especially important in a world where even professional reviewers cannot keep up with the pace of innovation.

While the functionality of the two sites is markedly different, I think they will eventually converge on the same point (social network-type ability to see what your friends like, dislike, etc., with a sub-group of experts on various subjects). ThisNext has more of a self-expressive tone to it, where hipsters can prove their hipness. Kaboodle is more functional, in my opinion, where roommates can post comments on each others’ choice for kitchen furniture, stero, or what have you.

In the end, however, it is about disintermediating information by taking the professional editor - the intermediary - out of the equation, and enabling direct expert-to-inquirer contact. As the world becomes increasingly segmented and varied - with products designed and marketed to extremely small subsets of the population - such disintermediation will be necessary, because editorializing will become uneconomical for all but the largest purchases. And because society will place a value on this new, more democratic, type of expert, I think it’ll be only a short time before there are ways for experts to monetise their expertise.

One, when I have a chosen product in mind, I’m looking for others’ experience with that product. Two, when I’m browsing for a type of product (i.e I’m looking for a neat gift for this occasion) I want suggested products pushed to me.

For example, check out http://www.classymommy.com where it’s a bit of blog/product finder mix - with a decent AJAX interface sprinkled on top. It’s got subjective opinion mixed with faceted classification. (I actually came across it from the thisnext blog - http://blog.thisnext.com/blog/classymommy.html)

As ThisNext’s CEO, I wanted to follow up on some of the comments above.

FWIW, I also want to say thanks to everyone for taking the time to share their thoughts. Feedback is the only way we can make ThisNext a true success.

Let me start by describing how we think of ThisNext and what we see our market opportunity to be.

In brief, we think that more and more people are migrating/creating their identities online. As such, these people need tools/services to help them express themselves. MySpace and blogs are great platforms but they don’t do everything well. For example, Flickr has become the photo layer of many people’s digital identity. YouTube has become the video layer. Right now, the product-specific layer is pretty open. We intend to provide a vendor-neutral, bi-directional product-layer for tastemakers who want to express themselves thru (in part) their product selections.

We believe that the product layer needs to be owned by an independent company, one not beholden to any particular manufacturer or etailer. Lawrence Coburn above raises the question of Amazon and how they should be able to stomp all over ThisNext and its ilk. Theoretically, I suppose it is possible, but, as prior history has shown, it is highly unlikely. Many incumbents who “should” have owned a vertical have failed to do so online as markets either emerged or shifted. For Amazon to adopt a totally open, discovery-oriented network model w/links back to blogs (as opposed to their monolithic centralized model) seems like it would b e a difficult shift for them to make both organizationally and from a business perspective. That said, we think Amazon does a fantastic job of being an ecommerce platform and we certainly keep an eye on what they do. If you all have any ideas on how to exploit additional opportunities or weakenesses in Amazon’s position, I would certainly love to hear them.

A couple of reviewers (ie Next Move, Bryan, Ted, etc) have suggested that ThisNext endeavours to solve a non-existant problem which nobody will be motivated to work on/contribute to.

While I agree that contributor motivations are a key consideration and agree w/Greg’s and Chris’ comments above, I have to respectfully (but not unexpectedly) disagree. Both our nascent community and the well-established/well-documented behaviours of product mavens in the real-world show that many people like to be regarded as experts or enthusiasts in their areas of interest. People contribute to their digital identity because of the social capital it earns them. Now, it is true that social capital is more existential than financial, but social capital has largely powered the blogosphere and, I suspect, the comments on TechCrunch. I go more into this topic of identity and consumption on my blog: http://gordon.blogsmith.com/20.....ing-seeds/

(Ted, btw, if you want to find a baby-stroller, several have been recommended on ThisNext (http://www.thisnext.com/search/?q=stroller) and you can also check out the “Mobility” list of the guy who designed the cadillac of strollers, the Bugaboo (http://www.thisnext.com/by/maxbarenbrug/))

Per Stephan’s comments about keeping motivations as pure as possible and our tech to date. On motivations: we know that not everyone will want to trust the wisdom of the crowd/net but figure that the behaviour of asking trusted sources their opinions is a well-established one offline. So we look to bring it online. Some people will undoubtedly try to game the system and we have spent a lot of time thinking about how that might happen. I would certainly love to chat if you have any additional ideas on how to safeguard/maximize the quality of our recommendations. On the Tech front: we are constantly refining our discovery algorithms but have been focused principally on launching and social architectures to date. Again, any further feedback here would be appreciated.

Lastly, what’s with the ridiculous accusations about buying off the NY Times and TechCruch? Both are respected publications and I strongly doubt either would be for sale. If you don’t trust the editorial, why do you bother to read it?

In any event, I encourage all of you to check out ThisNext. Also, please feel free to email me directly (gordon at thisnext dot com) or IM me (upoc01 on AIM).

I look forward to hearing from you all.

This is great if your spouse spends 12 hours a day at the office and your only job is to keep yourself off heroin and try not to cheat with the pool cleaner person. Or if you don’t have a career yet (could be a good thing these days) and have too much time on your hands. Otherwise it’s a waste of time.

I am way behind in my writing. The good news is that so many other people have written about ThisNext since we launched 3 weeks ago that I can let them speak for me. ThisNext launched our shopcasting network In case you missed it, ThisNext launched our…

They also own the world’s biggest and most effective affiliate program - Amazon Associates.

How long do you think it would take Amazon to turn on a shopcast Widget powered by their MILLIONS of reviews? And hook it into a Amazon Associates to do rev sharing with the reviewer?

If this concept of social shopping shows any legs at all (which it might), Amazon is going to come in and kick everybody’s ass.

One site you didn’t mention was Crowdstorm (http://www.crowdstorm.com) which takes this a step further and works out how buzzy products are and lets people add / edit them into a big wiki.

they find interesting niche products and i enjoy their writing style

1. Send me a Dollar.
2. I’ll tell you what to buy.

…site is profitable and the purchasing decision is out of your hands.
Everyones happy!

Um, would you care to tell me how to “place” a story in the NYT?

1) What tells me that the Jason Calacanis of printers, or the Jason Calacanis or sneakers won’t go and ‘buy out’ the top 100 ThisNext users to guarantee good reviews on certain products? Nothing, that’s what, nor do I have any guarantee the CNET editors aren’t on someone’s bankroll either - but at least CNET is legally responsible for the content, ThisNext won’t be (”our users did it”).

2) People turn to the internet to look for info about products when they shop, but - at least in my case - I do it because I want to find info from people’s actual experience with the product. If people are satisfied they won’t post - it’s if they are dissatisfied that they will. What’s the motivation for posting positive reviews here? Getting your mug on the ‘top100 contributors’ list? People will end up reviewing for the sake of reviewing, not because they care about the products. Like the Amazon comments system, but worse.

3) Michael is right in complimenting the site for the pretty graphics and well designed interface. However, I gave it a shot trying to buy something I know about, so I chose ‘Laptops’ and got a list of laptop bags (?), and a single user which for all I know could be on Dell’s bankroll. I thought ‘well, maybe it’s not just a laptop-kinda-site’, so I searched for my cell phone, the htc universal. I received a list of books, remote controls and a bizarre “University of Santa Monica –Graduate Programs in Spiritual Psychology”, which had apparently been recommended by the person who submitted it.

Even if they went beyond those limitations by adding more products and filtering out the spam, they’d have problem ‘a la’ digg or wikipedia where groups of users could ‘play the game right’ and influence the top recommended items, etc. And since we’re talking about shopping here, you’d have entire companies asking their employees to create profiles and ‘push’ their products.

Finally, they probably won’t do anything about point 1, 2 and 3 because it’s not in their interest to restrict the flow of reviews. Nuff’ said.