I can’t rely on Amazon to find gifts for others*. It’s quite effective at up-selling me. 10 minutes on Amazon can result in $1000 more of items added to my wishlist. However, all that personalization is just that, personal. Which isn’t all that bad. But around holidays and birthdays, web-savvy gift givers want to tap into the collective intelligence of the Internet to find gifts that are:

1. Personalized from the giver: I want the receiver to know that the gift came from me.

2. Personalized for the receiver: I want the gift to be “right” for the receiver.

Let’s start with Last.fm. One of the site’s newer features is the “Taste-o-meter.” Rather than just knowing who is like me (my “neighbors”), I also now know how much they are like me and what connects us, even if we are quite different. This is where it gets exciting.

It’s the SEAMS.

Seams are the interfaces, the connections, the ball bearings and lubricant. All the action happens at the seams–and that’s the intersection of the two personalization spheres above. In gift giving, I want the gift to represent me as the giver AND the receiver. In the Venn Diagram, it’s that intersection in the middle of the two interests. And better yet, in the best case, I want that overlapping section to be distinct from everyone else giving gifts. I want the receiver to know that only I could identify that overlap.

So how do I discover this? Last.fm could do it for music. Amazon could create it for Amazon-specific items. But is that expansive enough? My Grandma doesn’t use Amazon…

There are sites that try to solve for this: Google Find Gifts. But even the best of these are static, top-down, 2000 era models. Where are the gifts.com sites that leverage an architecture of participation and collective intelligence? Why can’t I have an eHarmony for gift searching?

It’s the perfect online business model because the value exchange is solving for the high consumer search costs with and online sale (at best) resulting in the end of a successful search. If I only had the time this would be a startup worth considering…

If I’m missing companies that are doing this right, let me know. And if you’ve got the hankering to realize this business model. let me know. We may have missed the holiday bubble, but there’s always Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day, and birthdays… to start.