Bagcheck, a startup backed by Sutter Hill Ventures, Morado Ventures, Jonathan Katzman and Peter Fenton, announced Monday that it has been acquired by Twitter. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Literally: it’s a site for listing things.
At the top of the home page, right now, I’m seeing Jackson Fox’s list of “Kitchen Essentials,” which includes an AccuSharp Knife Sharpener, Oxo Good Grips Locking Tongs and the RSVP Spice Measuring Spoon, each with corresponding links to the item’s page on Amazon.
Other users can like the list, suggest additional items or create a (new) similar list altogether. Within the list, users can actually comment on individual items too.
Creating a list is simple and intuitive: here’s my ranking of the best albums released in 2011, a list I put together in a matter of minutes.
For the time being, Bagcheck will stay online:
Bagcheck will continue to be available. That means all the great content you’ve made is staying online at the same URLs and will still be searchable, sharable, and lovable. But as with any acquisition, things may change at some point in the future, so if you’re worried about your content we’ve also created an instant export feature that will wrap all the bags you’ve made into a tidy set of HTML and JSON files. You can export all your content using this feature on your profile page and post or save your bags anywhere you like.
Joining Twitter’s engineering team is Sam Pullara, one of Bagcheck’s founders. The other co-founder, Luke Wroblewski, “is back to working on the next big thing,” according to the company, meaning there might be some new startup on the way.
I contacted Twitter to learn more about how the company might potentially add Bagcheck to its service’s functionality, but received only this reply:
“It’s too soon at this point to share any details on how and whether Bagcheck will be incorporated into Twitter,” said Lynn Fox with Twitter public relations.
Twitter added its own “Lists” feature back in October 2009, though that gives one the ability to list other users, not items. One can either follow an entire list, or browse lists to follow only certain accounts within them.
Though the price of the acquisition was not announced, it likely made only a small splash in Twitter’s warchest, just last week bolstered by a “significant” new round of funding from DST.
