After the annual holiday confusion about who’s getting whom what, I decided there had to be something better than Amazon wishlists. I had previously looked at a bunch of other wishlist sites and didn’t like any of them. I was starting to work on building my own when I ran across Wishcentral, which did most of what I wanted.

Here’s my new wishlist!

There’s a bunch of things I think they could do better. Their interface is a bit strange in places, but it’s simple enough.

First off, it would be great if they could import my Amazon wishlist.

They need a title for each item in addition to an optional description. In general it seems like there’s a lot of required data to adding a wish. I think it needs to be really easy to add something. On Amazon, it’s one click. How about looking up typical prices or scraping pages for the price? Why require a category? They have a pretty good bookmarklet though.

I would like to see wishlists for certain events, like a birthday. A kid’s birthday party is a good example. The kid can’t set up his own wishlist, so the parent does it and the family can go to the wishlist and look for gifts to buy under “Johnny’s 5th Birthday” event. I guess you can do that with custom categories, but most people wouldn’t figure that out.

There’s some good ideas in the optional profile like sizes for clothes. But they don’t have anywhere you can add a shipping address.

It would really make sense for them to offer RSS feeds of wishlists or at least have a way to embed them into a web page to promote my wishlist.

Any of these sites should be able to make some money off the referral codes to amazon and other stores. But it’s a bit scary that they’re asking for PayPal donations on their home page.

I’m looking forward to more improvements to this site, unless Yahoo brings back wishlists on Yahoo shopping and does them right.