Do you have a birthday coming up and want everyone to know just what gifts they should bring to the surprise party you're pretending not to know about? You can't email your friends and family a long list of "suggestions" since that would be tacky, and the Amazon Wishlist tool won't help if they don't have what you really have your heart set on. Enter Wists, the website that bills itself as a social shopping service.

Register at the site and place the Wist bookmarklet on your toolbar. When you come across something on the net that you must have, simply click on the bookmarklet, add a keyword, and Wist automatically saves your selection, along with an image of the product. Direct others to your Wist by giving them a link, pasting some code onto your website or, displaying your Wist right inside a post for maximum "suggestion power." The only niggling difficulty I encountered is that it wouldn't easily display images from Flash-heavy sites, but the ability to apply tags and keywords remained intact. Wists will make it easy for me to encourage the people in my life to go forth and shop for my upcoming birthday. I promise to be surprised about the party.