How To Split An Atom

The people who gave us BugMeNot are now releasing a widget for their sister site, RetailMeNot, that might help you save a few bucks this coming Holiday season.

BugMeNot helps you bypass irritating registration screens by letting you borrow pre-made user names and passwords that have been submitted by users. RetailMeNot once again uses kind citizens, but this time to help you find coupon codes for your favorite online stores.

They have listings for almost everything, from Amazon to Threadless and each code is ranked by how often that it has worked in the past.

Seasons Greeting

The new widget (available for Firefox, Mac Dashboard and iGoogle) will alert you anytime that you are on a site with an available discount. As annoying as the infobar is for sites that you visit frequently, it’s worth every bit of irritation the first time you are surprised by a new deal that you didn’t expect.

There are also a few other bugs that need to be ironed out of the Firefox plugin (the only one that I tested), but for a first version it works pretty well.

Web 2.0 Roundup

If you find yourself doing a lot of online shopping this holiday season, RetailMeNot is a great addition to your bargain hunting arsenal. That being said, if you are going weeks at a time without visiting an e-commerce site, the additional overhead of the infobar, the lack of customization and the lingering bugs mean that you might be better off waiting until you really need it.

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