TechCrunch announced the launch of Yahoo’s new Beta service, Yahoo! Shoposphere. Shoposphere is a service that allows users to create their own shopping lists and share them with others. You can create private, shared, or Pick List shopping lists with products that you like. People can then rate the lists and comment on them which make lists very helpful. I would imagine that my Christmas shopping will be pretty easy this year!

The main Shoposphere page shows the most recently created and most popular Pick Lists. But what is a Pick List? Pick Lists are like social shopping carts, if you will. You can add products to a list and share your opinions about each product. You can keep track of your experience with every product, email your Pick Lists to friends and family, and also view other member Pick Lists. To get started, simply login to your Yahoo! account, go to the shopping page, find a product, and select, “Save to My Lists.” Then select “Create a New List” and start adding products to your new list. If you have a great list, like Mike’s Web 2.0 Gadgets list (hah, right), you may be lucky to get your Pick List into the most popular listing.

What I liked was that you can add a product from any location in Yahoo! Shopping. As you pull up a listing of products, you will see a little link that says, “Save to My Lists.” When you click on this, it will drop down a menu of your lists and then you simply select the list you want to add the product to. I do like this, but I do not like how it will direct you to the list page itself and then have you navigate back to the previous page again. This is where Ajax would have really worked out nicely.

Is that all? Where is the tagging? Since we create lists, do we get any revenue share from it? According to TechCrunch, these features are on there way! You will soon be able to tag your own Pick Lists and then users can tag them as well. It is also said that Yahoo does expect to gather some traffic from Pick Lists and is planning to share some of their revenue streams with Pick List publishers. This will definitely help in getting people to create their own Pick Lists and also bring in some focus to products at Yahoo! Shopping. I personally feel this is a great move by Yahoo and especially with Christmas near. This will definitely help with my Christmas List this year!

View Yahoo! Shoposphere.