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"MyPickList are launching a brand new version their social shopping site today.  The site, you may remember, is a social shopping service like Kaboodle that lets you create a list of items you'd recommend to friends, post that list to blogs and social networks and  earn cash when people buy an item via your list.  In some ways, it's like an affiliate scheme for the social networking era.  Alas, the owners Sprout Commerce decided to take the site down - completely offline - for a few weeks while they made changes; that was probably unwise, but the improvements are certainly noticeable.\nThe most obvious change is a redesign: MyPickList is now simpler, glossier and less stale-looking.  But Sprout have also learned a lot from their sister site, FavoriteThingz, which offers product slideshows for MySpace to advertise your favorite brands (disclosure: I advised Sprout on this strategy and spoke to founder Jeff Eichel about the relaunch, although I'm not involved with the company at present).  MyPickList is now going in the same direction, providing widgets for MySpace, Piczo, Xanga, hi5, TagWorld, Friendster and others.  That's in contrast to the original strategy, which was more about building a whole new community than plugging in to existing social networks.  They're also more focused on brands now, rather than products: geeks might want to advertise the fact that they're Apple fans, while mainstream users might want to associate themselves with expensive fashion brands.  \nThe widgets, in fact, are pretty neat, with three different sizes, very advanced color customizations (you can change everything), four different transitions between brand images, three themes and lots of different skins.  The only drawback here is that the flashy slideshow format might not appeal so much to the site's original user base, who I suspect were mainly bloggers: they'd be wise to offer a \"boring\", list-based widget to prevent alienating all those users.  That's the risk with such a big change in direction: the original users probably won't like the new site as much.  They have offered some rewards for those core users, however: the commission rate has been increased to between 50% and 60% and the process of bookmarking items you find on websites has been simplified.\nPersonally, I think the changes make some sense.  But since FavoriteThingz is already catering to the MySpace crowd, I would have made MyPickList slightly less MySpacey - that would spread their bets if MySpace suddenly decide to block these widgets like they did with the webcam service Stickam.  It would also save them from offending the existing users.  Another fact worth noting: despite being almost perfectly targeted to the MySpace demographic, the folks at Mashable Labs only count around 500 MySpace profiles with a link to FavoriteThingz: they may need to seed the new widgets more aggressively.\nAll in all, I think it's an improvement, although the changes may be a little extreme for some existing users, especially after they were forced to tolerate a few weeks of downtime.\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/11/02/mypicklist-beta-2-launches-now-with-more-myspace/>