General

What is Wists? Wists is a shopping wishlist service where you can create visual list of things you want or recommend from any online store or website. It works like bookmarking a webpage, except that you get to choose a thumbnail image to associate with your bookmark.

Why is it called wists? Because wists is a tool to create lists, specifically wishlists the name is either a contraction of wishlists or web lists.

How do I use Wists? There are several ways you can use wists:

1. To find products recommended by others.

Because all of the items in wists are picked by real people, a searching for something such as a ‘chair’ on wists, gives you much more interesting results than a regular shopping search engine. Try it, and see if you agree: Search for chair on wists. search for chair on Froogle.

Anything in wists can be added with one click to your own list, complete with a picture.

2. To collect lists of things you want or recommend all in one place.

Many shopping sites have buttons that say ‘add to my wishlist’. The problem is that the wishlist only allows you to add items from that site. By signing up and installing the wists links in your browser, you

3. To create Wists - online shopping lists.
Wists consists of visual links to things with keyword tags - by adding a title and description to a particular keyword tag you create context around a tag, to make a wists list - a wist. A list is a webpage without the wists branding with a collection of items in a specific topic that you can link to or publish on you own website. Lists can be just like any regular tag, or they can have items rearranged into a specific order, for a numbered list or have items included on a map.

Wists lists allow you to create a weblog or a portion of your weblog all about things that you like or recommend. Because publishing to wists is as simple as bookmarking a webpage, a wists powered product blog is trivially easy - just add a piece of code to your website and wists will do the rest, no complicated image uploading or installation. We use wists ourselves to create our own product blogs such as Cribcandy.

Technical

What characters can I use for tags? When tagging, use standard English language characters (we will later add support for extended character sets). Individual words within a tag can be separated using underscores “_” e.g. “I_like_this”. Do not use characters such as: \ , /, &, +, ” ?, . For example “80211.b” is not a valid tag. Multiple tags are entered using spaces e.g. “wishlist gadget cellphone”.

What is meta-tagging? For normal use you don;t need to use or know about meta-tags, however, for power users they can be very useful. When you tag an item with a keyword such as “turkey”. what you are implicitly saying is “category=turkey”. The problem with this is that sometimes “category” is not enough context for a tag. Wists allows you to lable the context of a tag with anything (where the default is implicitly “category”). In the above example you could label something as “food=turkey” or “country=turkey”. These groups of tags, “metatags” allow you to indicate the context of a tag and give tags greater meaning and less ambiguity. Popular metatags that people have already created include location= for places and fav= for people’s favorit emovies and books etc.

What happens to tags when I ‘add’ from someone else’s Wists? When you add from someone else, their tags are copied, if you want to change the tags, click ‘edit’ under the item, in ‘MyWists’. Changing the tags for the item will not affect the original user’s tags for that item.

When I search, some items show prices and come from online stores. Why is that? Wists inlcudes a shopping aggregation engine, which pulls items from hand picked online stores. When we aggregate information we include information such as price and descriptions that aren’t automatically grabbed when bookmarking. Unlike most shopping aggregation services, Wists only aggregates from stores that have interesting or unusual items. We don’t aggregate things like spare parts for cars or a gazillion bedding items, for example. Less is more!

Can I subscribe to Wists in my RSS aggregator? Yes, the orange XML icon lets you subscribe to any user’s Wists or even a particular tag from a specific user or all users.

Can I delete an item from my Wists? Yes. View your Wists by clicking on ‘MyWists’ or at the url: http://wists.com/username and remove items by clicking on delete. Once deleted, to re-add an item you can bookmark it again.

The Wists bookmarklet does not work in my browser? In addition to the standard bookmarklet, there is a ‘light’ version that works with browsers such as older versions of Safari which may not be able to take advantage of the fully featured bookmarklet. This is available by clicking on ‘help’ in the top menu. Some people may have trouble using the full bookmarklet behind firewalls, in which case the light version is recommended.