PUT ON YOUR SHOPPING SHOES
Well, Thanksgiving "the major holiday" is over, and it's time to prepare for "the other major holiday" that involves stressing out with and over family responsibilities.
It's a time of year I relish and dread the most. I know it's supposed to be a fun process shared with friends and family, with guidance from your spouse, but it's also a source of agita for most.
With all the iPods out from Apple this year, my first thought was to just get everybody on the list
an iPod or Towels, depending on whether they'd been "good" or "bad" all year....basically borrowing and modifiying the strategy of Bill Murray in "Scrooged"-a true holiday classic ("VCR or Towels" was the choice he had back in 1988).
But then you read Jeremy Zawodny ("Steve Jobs ruined my Thanksgiving") and Dave Winer's experience with their brand, spanking new iPods, fuse it with your own similar experiences with iPods, and decide that it may not be the best way to go, as seductively simple as it may seem.
Not to mention my own, hopefully temporary,"iPod fatigue".
Of course, I need to mention also that my wife would immediately veto the idea as she tries to implement a less gadget-free diet to my usual gift-giving habits.
So it's back to the regular, American tradition of getting through post-Thanksgiving shopping stress.
Every ad around you (TV, newspapers, etc.) since yesterday has started to remind you that you better get your Holiday/Christmas shopping act together again...and NOW. Of course with the subliminal "guilt-trip" message that you're a total loser if you don't.
The local TV news last night had a video clip of a Wal-mart somewhere where people started a mini-riot as they tried to enter the store for it's "limited" early-bird shopper specials. I mean there were images of people almost getting trampled as people behind them rushed to get their hands on something or the other at x% off.
Apparently this is going on all over the country as stores try to evoke an early-shopping rush with lines around the store at 5 am.
The only time such behavior is barely understandable is when a building you're in is on fire. NOT when your American-bred, shopping hormones are on fire.
On the other hand, there's the thoughtful, considered, microchunked ecommerce way to get ready for Holiday/Christmas shopping, with social shopping services like Cribcandy to figure out what you might want to get for whom.
VC Jeff Clavier had a post up on another social shopping startup Kaboodle, which may be worth checking out. It's another social tagging service that can help find that perfect daybed gift through the collective efforts of others who've been trolling for the same thing.
On the mini-rant front, the service would be a lot better if it had a search box right up front rather than just a scrolling list of the "freshest Kaboodles". Come on guys, I've got enough shopping stress building already than to scroll through other people's shopping lists at random.
As an aside, don't you hate it when you try to sign up for a promising new Web 2.0 service, only to be told that the user name you want has already been taken? And then, just to check you try to just log in and discover that you'd signed up for this service already some time ago and totally forgotten about it?
Wouldn't you love to have some software/web service that automatically tracks everything you've signed up for on the web, and remembers it for you? Better still, reminds you to get check it out once ina while? I know I would.
Back to the Holiday shopping subject at hand, I'm determined to find the best Web 2.0 tools/services/tricks to get through the process with less stress this year.
Any suggestions and thoughts you all might have would be appreciated. What plans do you have, if any, on making Web 2.0 help you through the holiday shopping season upon us?
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