Huddler's new green shopping community

There are a lot of product recommendation engines in the world. In fact, one could make a pretty good case that there are too many. But Huddler may have actually gotten it right this time.

It's launched a service with a green spin at greenhome.huddler.com. The site is a blog, a social network, a wiki, and a recommendation system all rolled into one. I've spent the last hour on it, enjoying myself tremendously.

I've written reviews of a few green products I own (like the Earth LED CL-5), and I marked a few items as things that I very much want to own (like the Chevy Volt).

The system is extremely simple to use, not to mention pleasing on the eyes. There seems to be a pretty good community growing up inside of the site, plus a huge amount of information on thousands of green products. You can subscribe to users, discussions, topics, anything! It's a joy to use.

Of course, like all social sites, there is a battle to be fought for participation. It will only be a truly enjoyable and robust platform if a large community adopts the site. In order to entice folks, they've got a giveaway going on right now, which you enter yourself into every time you do anything on the site. So that's nice.

But we'll have to wait and see if Huddler can somehow create a chicken without an egg.