Mid-week Morsel: Wish Lists for the 21st Century

As usual, right after Christmas, the kids start finding things they wish they would have put on their Christmas lists, or bought with their Christmas money.  And as usual, I tell them to ask for the items for their birthdays.  The only problem is that none of their birthdays are for a few months, and no on can ever seem to remember those really cool, I've gotta have it right now, items when the birthdays start rolling around.

This year, I decided to seek out a more modern way to keep track of all those must-haves.  A quick Google search showed that there are several free online wish list services available including, AddWish, WishListr, Giftster, and WantsThis.  I did a little more searching and found some reviews.  Using the information I found, I was able to narrow my list of possible sites down to two, WishListr & WantsThis.

Since they are both free, I decided to set up accounts on both sites so I could truly compare them side by side.  Both were easy to use, and visually appealing.  Both had nifty bookmarklet options to make adding items to the list convenient.  Both also allowed visitors to mark items as purchased so as to prevent duplicates, however, there was one feature on WantsThis that I really liked; the rest of the family doesn't have to sign up for an account in order to view the kids' lists.  The reason for that just happened to be one of my daughter's favorite features on WantsThis.  Each user is given his/her own url.  It works like this; if I were to set up a wish list with the username Simply The Good Life, my url would be SimplyTheGoodLife.WantsThis.com.  My daughter thought is was really cool that the website's url stated that [she] wants this.  When it comes time to share their lists with family members, all we have to do is send one mass email with the each child's url, and everyone can keep up with their ever-changing wishes.  Hooray!

Karissa