MyPickList is somewhat like an Amazon list, except you get money on commissions when people buy products through your list. It’s basically like being an Amazon affiliate, except that you’re not limited to only Amazon, but a plethora of merchants, including Best Buy, iTunes, and Barnes & Noble.

Once becoming a member, you can create lists either by manually adding them, or using a toolbar button that can automatically obtain information from a product page (like Amazon). You are then encouraged to give a review of the item and rate it. Once you build your list, you can broadcast it to places like your blog or website, and hopefully generate some income when people of similar tastes buy products through your list. Your list will also show when people browse to a specific item that your list contains.

MyPickList also injects some social networking by allowing comments on items, alerting you when common items appear on other people’s lists, and giving you the ability to add friends in the network. But the foundation of MyPickList is the list itself, which they hope you will broadcast to as many places as possible. All earned commissions will go straight to your Paypal account, which is a requirement for participating.

MyPickList is attempting to create a social commerce network website based on word-of-mouth (aka lists). The commission rates vary from merchant to merchant, and can be as low as 1.0% (Buy.com) to as high as 6.0% (shoebuy.com). I know for a fact that being an Amazon Associate gets you a 4.0% commission rate to start with, as opposed to the 2.5% that MyPickList gives you. This gives you an idea of how much MyPickList takes off the top, which I am pegging at around 1.5% to 2%.

I could see this service being great for people who have a very focus set of tastes. If a user can garner enough fans for their list, they could probably do pretty well for themselves. But, for some of the merchants like Netflix, the product is too horizontal to be worthwhile for the average user. If someone doesn’t already have a Netflix account, I don’t think I will be the one to persuade them to get one. But if the product is an obscure indie pop band, I might be able to persuade someone to explore that purchase more easily.

In essence, MyPickList is empowering the average user who doesn’t get a lot of traffic to their website (or who doesn’t even have one) to get ad revenues for products they enjoy. But, for someone who is savvy enough to create and market their own website with a focus on consumer products, they could do better by becoming an Amazon Associate, or something of an equivalent nature elsewhere.

MyPickList’s business model is a good one: let your users advertise for you.

Wine geeks can breathe a sigh of relief: there’s a new place for venting your bad experiences with that glass of Chardonnay you simply can’t stand. cork’d just launched recently, and allows wine fans to review and keep track of their favorite wines. I don’t know of any other collaborative wines review site, so cork’d has the space, for the moment.

Everything you expect from a reviews site is available at cork’d. You can (of course) leave reviews for a particular wine, keep a “cellar” list of wines you own, make shopping lists, and recommend wines. And, just like any good social reviews site, you can keep track of what your friends are drinking as well. Most everything has an associated feed, so you can keep up to date on anything from a particular user’s reviews to reviews made on a particular wine.

I could see cork’d being useful for wine aficianados who want to expand their horizons. But, another market segment that might be interested are the winemakers themselves–a winemaker could simply subscribe to their wine feed and find out what their customers think. This is similar to what I hope BuzzShout can be to early startups that want to know how their product is doing.

During the review process, you can tag wines and rate them on a five point scale. Afterwards, you can always go back and edit your reviews. I did see some bugs in their system involving lost text in my reviews, but I’m sure those kinks will be sorted out quickly.

The site itself is well designed. The color motif is very “winey”, with the burgundy red on top and the tannish color in the body. Tundro, the people behind cork’d, has done a great job with the design with smart wine graphics and a pleasing interface. Judging by the urls and interface, I would guess the site is built on RoR.

In terms of the wine selection, cork’d seems to be crawling the web for wines, and grabbing the product information when available. If you don’t see your favorite wine on the list, there is also an option to add a new bottle to the system. Depending on the intensity of their focus on aggregation, cork’d could turn out to be a valuable place for wine lovers to peruse a vast list of wines. Another valuable tool is browsing their selection by tasting tag, which allows you to peruse, say, fruity wines, or melony wines.

Their business model is currently based on sponsorship. A couple discreet ads are placed on the sidebar navigation. Fittingly enough, wine.com is an early sponsor on the site.

Overall, cork’d has great execution, and possibly a head start on any competitors. Tell all your wine friends to sign up and share the tasty knowledge.

Update: TastyDrop is also in this space, but their interface is more like digg-for-wine, which is missing tags and feeds. Despite this, they do seem to have a larger user base at the moment, so cork’d may need to play some catch-up.

Steve Rubel points to the launch of Inquisitor, a web based version of the Safari and Camino plug-in for Spotlighting the web. It’s basically a quick meta-search engine that allows visitors to quickly search through various other search engines and services. It currently only works with Firefox and Opera (although I’ve failed to make it work in that latter, anyone else have any luck?).

The interface takes a simple two paned approach: search options on the left, and the search engine (or web service that is being searched) on the right. As with spotlight, Inquisitor will suggest search options as you type. Another suprising element is that Inquisitor will actually search Google as you type. So, for every keystroke, Google is getting pinged for a search request. I’m not sure if this is how the Safari plug-in works, and I wonder if Google will put a stop to this if it’s causing a high hit density.

For the other services, the search is more rudimentary. Even though it’s pinging the same services, I still feel as though the searches are snappier, even with services that I usually find quite slow to search (ahem, like Technorati).

I probably won’t use Inquisitor much, except when I’m doing some heavy-duty research that requires a lot of searching. It would be nice if they could include more flavors of Google search. Overall though, the service is clean, snappy, and simple.

For many of us, there is that time at the end of the week spent trying to approximate where our time went in the midst of dizzyingly complex development work. More often than not, this task can be infuriating: it’s easy to forget what you were doing during the first half of Monday–was I fleshing out the UML? Or was I doing some debugging on the main module? Usually, we end up fudging our results, or making rough estimates.

This is okay most of the time. But, what if you find yourself really getting behind without really knowing why? This is when time management tools really come in handy. There are numerous good choices out there that will allow you to enter in data and metadata about the time you’ve spent on your projects–and, even keeping track of multiple projects.

But, one thing that most of these services do not provide is an automatic way for you to enter in the times that you worked on a project. At the end of the day, the systems still depend on your faulty memory of the week. 88 Miles, a new time tracking service that just launched this month, aims to provide an easier way to track your time without all the mental gymnastics.

The idea behind 88 Miles is that a little work now will save a lot of work later. Ironically, the application works like the time trackers of old: punch in when you start work on a project, and punch out when you end work on it. 88 Miles keeps track of the time, duration, and date of your work. At the end of the week, you’ll have yourself a neat little timesheet that represents the breakdown of your efforts.

Of course, the accuracy of such a report hinges on your discipline in using 88 Miles. Personally, my projects aren’t logistically complex enough to use 88 Miles, but I know a number of people who would benefit from this tool, and wouldn’t mind the small overhead of clicking a button once in a while.

Currently, the features of 88 Miles, which is built with Ruby on Rails, are quite simple. The founder, and yet another single-man team, Myles Eftos, is a freelance web developer in Perth, Wester Austrialia working under the moniker of MadPilot Productions. He’s been in the industry for about the last 5 years, sub-contracting to other web design firms around Perth.

Myles is currently working on a webservice API to promote mashups and extensions to 88 Miles. These will also form the basis of desktop and possibly PDA and phone interfaces. In addition, a corporate version is also in the pipeline which would allow managers to create and manage a group of users.

If all goes well, 88 Miles is set to target freelance and small web firms. But it doesn’t stop there, 88 Miles could possibly extend its reach into a plethora of other industries, including graphic designers, accountants, and engineers.

I would say that if 88 Miles adds a desktop app to quickly access your projects, and a few more organizational bells and whistles, I’ll be hooked.

Qvey just launched a few days ago, and provides a new way for people and organizations to get feedback. Joe Marrow, the single-man team behind Qvey, hopes to empower the little guy to get quality feedback without expending too much money.

The feedback structure of Qvey is based on micropayments. Every user who answers a priced survey question will be compensated by the price. This is in stark contrast to typical surveys which give out an iPod, or something similar, for every millionth customer. The question is: would you be willing to give up the chance for an iPod for say, 50 cents now? In most cases, the answer probably is: Heck yeah.

After accumulating a dollar’s worth of payments, you can have the option to cash out, or create a survey of your own using the proceeds from your payments. Asking questions is easy, all you need to do is to specify the question format (1-10 rating, yes/no, multiple choice, or short answer), and the compensation each user receives for their input.

When the results are in, some nice flash based results graphs are provided. The cool part is that if a certain question that you didn’t write interests you, you can also take a look at the results after filling out the survey.

Some of the examples of potential uses of Qvey include:

• A band releases a single, and puts it on Qvey. They’ve gotten
  valuable feedback, and gained a lot of exposure.
• A small company is in early development of a product, and needs
  immediate feedback on a concept.
• A recently graduated photographer is readying for their first
  gallery show, and unsure which shots to include.
• A company is having a hard time choosing between two finalists for
  a new product logo. Qvey could allow the community to decide the winner.

The inspiration for Qvey stems from the fact that most participants of online communities are in it for themselves. A micropayment scheme is great for motivating the masses to provide feedback. Joe, who is a partner in a small design firm and has over 10 years experience in web design and development, was also inspired by the Digg community, and the amount of influence they can have on the end product. Qvey hopes to see this happen for opinions and feedback.

Some of the new features that Qvey might implement in the future are blog integration, private invitation surveys, more robust charting and reporting, and more community oriented features like ranking and karma.