Amazon Adds Universal Wish List

Amazon.com's Wish List feature has been around a long time - over 10 years in fact. However, recently the e-commerce site expanded it with a new feature called The Universal Wish List.

Using a simple bookmarklet (drag this to your bookmarks) you can now add any item to your list from anywhere on the web. As you can see from the image above, I was able to use the tool to add a Brett Favre jersey from NewYorkJets.com to my wish list. Once it was there, the new item basically acts like a bookmark, taking me back to the original site where I found the product.

Wish lists are one of the earliest forms of online social expression. You can add Amazon's wish list to your site as a widget or even your Facebook or Friendfeed profile. A list of products that people have added to their wish list can be found over on Friendfeed.

Now that Amazon has expanded this longtime feature of the site, I expect we'll see a certain type of user keeping their lists there - which if anything gives Amazon more data into insights into how people shop. In addition, it's conceivable that this could become a social commerce feature over time given Amazon's popular Associates program.