Social shopping site Kaboodle, which was acquired by Hearst Interactive Group in 2007 for $30 million or so, is trying its hand at social commerce with new community-driven flash sales site PopPicks.

PopPicks, which is members-only, partners with a retailer each week to feature a collection of products. The Kaboodle community is then invited to vote for the products they like best. After four days of voting, the most liked products are made available to Kaboodle members at an steeply discounted prices for four days or until the inventory is sold out.

While Kaboodle is a little late to the online sample sale game, with the element of voting, PopPicks has a slightly different take on the flash-sales model that Gilt Groupe, Ideeli, Hautelook, Beyond The Rack and others have seen success with. The ability to vote on what clothes go on sale could be a compelling feature to the flash-sales market. Initially, PopPicks will feature primarily fashion apparel and accessories and will eventually broaden its offering to include retail brands in home, beauty and gadgets.

Kaboodle, which underwent a realtime makeover earlier this year, has over 1 million registered users. Launched in 2005, Kaboodle faces competition from ThisNext, Like.com and Sugar’s ShopStyle.

Social shopping site Kaboodle, which was acquired by Hearst Interactive Group in 2007 for $30 million or so, is re-launching its site to upgrade its product-discovery engine that allows online shoppers to discover, search for, browse, and interact with the more than six million products.

Kaboodle is a free social bookmarking service and search product that allows you to discover and share e-commerce content. With the re-launch and re-design of the site, Kaboodle is becoming less content centric and more realtime and product and people centric.

The new version of the product-discovery engine allows online shoppers to search and discover products according to normal search terms, but also according to popularity amongst other shoppers in the Kaboodle community and consumers. The platform has upgraded search to be realtime and lets users see products that are most popular right now based on specific filters, such as items from a specific store, within a specific category, related items, and more. For example, a user can see what are the most popular items being searched on Nordstrom.com.

Kaboodle’s bookmarklet functionality which allows users to add products from anywhere on the Web is staying the same, but the site has made it easier for retailers to incorporate the bookmarklet on their own sites. Manish Chandra, co-founder of Kaboodle, says that the site will continue to make realtime improvements in the coming year, hoping to become the go-to destination for product discovery and sharing. Chandra says the site has over 1 million registered users and is seeing 8 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore. Launched in 2005, Kaboodle faces competition from ThisNext, Like.com and Sugar’s ShopStyle.

Wishpot is a social shopping service that lets you collect and and share information about items you find online and in stores. By creating a common space in which users can browse, recommend products, get advice, and find new items they’re interested in, Wishpot seeks to simplify shopping.

The company said it would use the funding to further enhance its vertical offerings, improve the Wishpot platform, increase business development activities and introduce business analytics for enterprise customers.

Wishpot competes in the same space as Kaboodle, Stylehive, Yahoo Shoposphere, Zlio and MyPickList.

Here are my takeaways. MySpace is still growing at a healthy 23 percent, despite its size. But Facebook is coming on fast, with 129 percent growth. Notice also the strong showing by Bebo (growing 83 percent) versus the lackluster U.S. growth of Hi5 (3 percent) and the decline of Xanga (negative 55 percent).

In blogging platforms, Blogger is beating Six Apart on both absolute numbers (32 million visitors versus 13 million) and growth (55 percent versus 44 percent). In the doldrums territory, you’ve got Windows Live Spaces (with a one percent decline) and Yahoo Groups (four percent decline). And in the you-ought-to-seriously-think-of-shutting-this-down territory, there is Lycos Tripod (23 percent decline), MSN Groups (36 percent decline), and Yahoo 360 (’nuff said).

Here is a more comprehensive list of social sites ranked by total number of visitors. It includes sites where comScore could not calculate a growth rate because it did not have enough data for September, 2006. Some sites that stand out on this list, having come out of nowhere in the past year, include WordPress.com (with 11.9 million monthly visitors), Freewebs (with 6.6 million), BuzzNet (with 4.4 million),and Kaboodle (with 2.5 million). (Update: Also, you will notice that Google’s social networking site Orkut isn’t even on the list. That is because while it had 24.6 million visitors worldwide in September, 2007, Orkut only attracted 503,000 visitors in the U.S.).

Clavier, who has a degree in computer science, has been actively investing in startups over the last few years and has had notable successes such as Truveo (acquired by AOL for a rumored $50 million), Userplane (acquired by AOL for a rumored $35 million), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo for $10 million), Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst for a rumored $30-40 million), Mayas Mom (acquired by BabyCenter for $7 million), Dogster, Kongregate, Edgeio and many others. In other words, he has an eye for winners. His investment philosophy will remain much the same, he says. He’s just now investing money from limited partners as well as his own capital.

He says he’ll invest the fund in a total of 30 to 40 seed stage startups with investments ranging from $100k – $500k. SoftTech VC will focus on consumer Internet.

Clavier has made four initial investments through the fund: Satisfaction Unlimited, Social Media Network, Grouply (which will launch at the conference today) and Active Athlete.

Kaboodle, founded by Manish Chandra, Keiron McCammon, Chetan Pungaliya, closed a key distribution deal with eBay a year ago. Comscore numbers show rapid growth, with 2 million or so unique monthly visitors currently.

The acquisition price is not being disclosed, but we’re hearing it was somewhere between $30 – $40 million, all cash. The company raised three rounds of financing totaling $5 million from Shea Ventures, Kanwal Rekhi, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, Garage Ventures, Georges Harik, Rajeev Motwani, Iggy Fanlo and others.

One other thing we’ve heard – investor Ron Conway was “instrumental” in putting this deal together.

Kaboodle is a bookmarking service that focuses on specific content within a page – see our launch profile of the company here. Kaboodle is useful for collaborative research (I used it last year to organize a ski trip with friends), and Kaboodle is often used for ecommerce research. The site launched in October and has about 20,000 active users and 150,000 unique visitors a month according to Manish.

This partnership will certainly increase those user numbers dramatically. The eBay Collectibles category has always had high sales velocity (over 10,000 items are sold every hour on eBay in this category alone) and eBay will be dedicating “substantial” resources to promote the new service.

eBay users who purchase and sell items in the collectibles category will be able to showcase products they’ve purchased on ebay or elsewhere, tag them and allow comments (all standard Kaboodle functionality). The site already allows users to auto-import items they’ve purchased on eBay. in the future they’ll be able to list items within MyCollectibles for sale on eBay with a couple of clicks.

The new site will be demo’d at the eBay Live 2006 conference in Las Vegas this weekend. I am here attending the conference, and look forward to getting additional information on the product.

This announcement, along with eBay’s announcement last week to integrate blogs and wikis into the ebay experience, indicates that eBay intends to provide social networking services before and after actual sales and have a deeper connection with users.

A few companies caught my eye today as the ones to watch this year. Here they are:

Blurb

Blurb will turn your blog or other website into a book. As in, a real, tangible book that you can hold. The service is now in private beta and will be available to the public in March(ish). CEO Eileen Gittins does a great job describing the product and this looks to be an interesting space, especially for ego-type purchases where bloggers buy a copy for themselves.t’ll be about $30 for a four color, 40 page, 8×10 hardcover book with a custom dust jacket.

Kaboodle

I wrote about Kaboodle, a clip service that is really useful for gathering and sharing information on the web, back in October. They launched some incredible new features this week to normalize data across items: search for items, clone/copy a page, find related items, vote on items, etc. They are also allowing users to create profiles to allow more social aspects. A lot of people are finding Kaboodle to be a very useful shopping tool.

Kosmix

Mountain View based Kosmix is a structured search engine with three current verticals: health, politics and travel. More are coming soon. Instead of showing linear, Google-like results, Kosmix is categorizing results to create a taxonomy. They claim their engine can be used to create good results over almost any topic area. This is one to watch and I’ll be doing a full profile on them soon.

Krugle

Fred Wilson wrote about Krugle today as well, saying “It’s a search engine for open source software. Vertical search for open source. Sounds like a good concept. The demo was simple and the proposition was compelling. Not sure how they make money, but the demo isn’t supposed to focus on that.” Knowing how often developers use search engines to find code snippets, this will be an extremely useful. The company is based in Silicon Valley and Josh Kopelman is an investor.

Plum

Everyone’s buzzing about Plum, a new social bookmarking application with easy tools to turn bookmarked content into blog entries, photo album, feed list, etc.. Full profile coming soon.

Sharpcast

Sharpcast, led by CEO Gibu Thomas, just launched this week as well. It’s an incredibly powerful platform to synchronize data and any application between (certain) mobile devices and the desktop. The photo showcase application is compelling. Look for a full review on MobileCrunch. Sharpcast is funded and has the smell of a company that can go all the way.

Zingee

I finally got a look at newcomer storage service Zingee, which would have been included on my “Online Storage Gang” post if they had been around. Zingee could be serious competition for Omnidrive, with high end sharing features, permanent URLs for files, no file size restrictions (yeah!) and other neat feature. Full profile coming soon.

Lots more companies to write about tomorrow. See Jeff Clavier and Erick Schonfeld for additional profiles.

Kaboodle opened its doors this afternoon for an official launch on Wednesday.

I met with Manish Chandra, the CEO, earlier today for a walk through and came away very impressed. In addition to Manish, Kaboodle’s founders include Keiron McCammon and Chetan Pungaliya.

Kaboodle is a free social bookmarking service. And it really does take things to the next level in terms of usefulness, particularly for certain types of stuff. For instance, Kaboodle really shines when bookmarking ecommerce content.

The first thing to do after registration is add a kaboodle button to your browser. When you click to bookmark content, you are redirected to Kaboodle where you select a “page” (topic). Content is auto-selected, including an image. A click lets you change or add to the content and/or select a new image.

Once you’ve added content to a page you can choose to make it public or private, and share it with others. New content can be added to a page from other sites. Each piece of content can be rated by others, and free-text comments can be added. It is an excellent way to collaborate with others in comparing and contrasting related content. In fact, in many ways Kaboodle reminds me of a wiki once the collaboration on a page begins.

Coming soon functionality includes page badges, search and RSS for users and pages. I’d also like to see tagging functionality added to pages and individual pieces of content.

Om Malik wrote a lengthy post on Kaboodle a few hours ago. In my opinion Manish Chandra and the rest of the team have done a great job rolling this out. They are talking to bloggers and mainstream press simultaneously, and the site is a textbook example of how to walk new users through how the service works. They’ve thought through launch strategy and usability in a very intelligent way.