ThisNext set up an entirely new parent company, Curatemedia, which will be the corporate brand that will operate both ThisNext and Stylehive henceforth.

ThisNext says its latest round comes from Clearstone Venture Partners and Anthem Venture Partners, which as far as we can tell were all prior investors in the company, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. According to the CrunchBase profile for ThisNext, entrepreneur and angel investor (and TechCrunch50 partner) Jason Calacanis was an early backer of the company and serves on its board.

According to the startup, the capital will be used to develop additional shopping tools, facilitate commerce functionality and to fuel the growth of Curatemedia into new verticals and categories. Stylehive, its first acquisition, is a fashion and beauty community and claims over 600,000 registered users. Stylehive made an acquisition of its own back in 2007, scooping up fashion social media startup Stylediary for an undisclosed amount.

In related social shopping business news, Time Inc. last week acquired StyleFeeder for “well into eight figures.”

ThisNext launched in 2006 with a product that offers shopping combined with comments, tagging, social recommendations, comment ratings and a wishlist. Users can also create a website widget to show products they like to others via any website.

The company has close links to Jason Calacanis, with Calacanis sitting on the board, and CEO Gordon Gould was previously with Blogsmith (the platform behind Weblogs Inc) and Silicon Alley Reporter.

See Michael’s 2006 review of ThisNext here.

(via PEHub)

The king of this space is CNET reviews, which combines editor reviews with lots of pictures and structured data with direct user reviews as well. In May Yahoo launched Yahoo Tech, directly targeting CNET Reviews as well. When I research products, I usually don’t go much further than these two sites (although I spend a lot of time on the gadget blogs trying to find out exactly what new stuff I intend to research). Of course, CNET and Yahoo Tech focus solely on technology gadgets.

Other services have launched in this space as well, generally focusing on wish lists, recommendation lists or both, and often giving users tools to put widgets with recommended or desired products up on their blogs or websites. See our posts on Kaboodle, Stylehive, Yahoo Shoposphere and MyPickList. Wists is another site in this category, although we have not written about it yet. These sites expand well beyond technology in their product reviews.

These sites generate revenue from affiliate fees (via links to ecommerce sites) and/or via contextual advertising placed on the site, usually Google.

And now comes ThisNext, a Los Angeled based company with a NYT writeup as well as a thumbs up from Jason Calacanis (Jason used to work with the CEO, which may explain his mention of the product).

The site is the best I’ve seen so far, with clearly structured items and very easy ways for users to add their own opinion via comments, tagging, comment ratings and adding things to a wishlist. There are easy to find “buy” links if you want to purchase the item. Users can also create a website widget to show off the stuff they really like. Good stuff, well executed.

But I have never gotten that excited about sites like ThisNext and the others mentioned above. I don’t believe they will ever succeed in drawing customers away from big Internet brands like CNET and Yahoo, who are already doing a very good job of integrating user reviews with editorial reviews and content.

Neither the NYT or Jason mention that CNET is already out there and dominates this space for tech products. The NYT should have…writer Bob Tedeschi clearly intended to give ThisNext a positive review (complete with a picture of the CEO walking with a surfboard) but he never seems to be able to put his finger on why it’s so great.

Jason, however, nails it. He thinks ThisNext can be successful because it will show emerging trends in what consumers like.

It’s sort of like taking “The Tipping Point” concepts and making them into a product you can actually use. For example, as the community grows you’ll be able to see who recommended a product first. After some period of time you might be able to find the people who are good at finding–or creating–trends.

CNET doesn’t do this, they simply review products and put their reviews up on the site. They do not show how certain products become hot over time, and what people are good at picking winners.

This type of thing might find a niche – it won’t displace blogs that are dedicated to talking about the newest and greatest products in a given space, and they won’t displace the big review sites like CNET for people who want to find reviews on a product they already know about. But perhaps they can serve people who want to be a part of a community that decides what products are hot and which are not.

Am I excited? No. But I’m intruiged enough to write about this at 3:30 in the morning. Or maybe I’m not excited because it’s 3:30 in the morning. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.