RetailMeNot makes finding online coupons less annoying

I love a good deal, and the number of sites out there to help get special codes and links is massive and frequently packed with annoyances like pop-up ads and outdated content. To help sort through it I usually use Google, but a service called RetailMeNot seems like a worthy addition. The site's been around since last year, but has launched a new community portion of its site this morning that makes the coupon hunting experience a little more social and a lot easier to keep track of what deals are hot.

The service was created by the same folks who did BugMeNot and PDFMeNot (review) and follows a similar simplicity of letting you plug in a domain name of an online shop you're interested in like Amazon or GoDaddy to see if there are any promotional codes for discounts that might save you some cash.

With the new community additions the process goes a step further, letting other RetailMeNot users add their own coupon codes and note when they've successfully used a code to make an online purchase. Those updates, and other additions to the listings go into a central pool of updates, similar to Facebook's news feed. Ideally keeping an eye on this feed would give you the heads up on a new deal right when it's made available. It'll also try to match you up with other users based on the items you rate, similar to a service like Last.fm that matches you up with people who have similar tastes in music.

The rest of the features follow suit with any other modern day social network. Each user gets a profile and a variety of boxes to fill out to show their personality. It's the kind of thing I don't see a lot of my friends spending time or effort to engage in considering their efforts on pre-existing services. However, I really like the idea of collaborating with others to get good deals, which is something SlickDeals and FatWallet do a very good job at. If RetailMeNot could make this a good Facebook or MySpace application that does the same thing, I could see a lot of people flocking to it--myself included.

RetailMeNot lets you scour for deals. It also has a social element that lets you see deals other people are scoping out. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)