Hey, It’s Friday, right? So what better day to do a review of Boozle?

Perth-based Boozle is a site with the following admirable goals:

to ensure alcohol consumers always get the best price available, and to ensure retailers are rewarded for providing the lowest prices.

The process is simple. You select the type of alcoholic beverage you’re interested in, enter your postcode details, and Boozle goes and finds the cheapest alcohol in and around your suburb. Sweet!

On top of that there are reviews of various drinks which can help the thirsty web-surfer decide whether it’s worth trying that new type of beverage or to stick with the old favourite.

The site is currently free for users and the retailers, but you’d imagine that they’d move beyond an advertising-based model once they get the required traction and a large enough community of users.

Co-founders Darcy Byrne and Luke Mahe managed to get a bit press when they launched the site back in September ‘06,  but since then they’ve grown their database and now have pricing information from over 4000 stores around the country, including Woolworths Liquor, BWS and Cellarbrations.

Speaking of the team, they’re a perfect example of how the Internet allows people to work in new ways. There’s no traditional office enviornment here. Byrne gets to live and run the operation out of his parents house, while Mahe is a web developer who makes a buck as a web developer at Google’s San Francisco office.

There are a few competitors in the space, Boozewatch and Grogwatch to name a couple, but neither of them seems to do the job as well as Boozle, or to have as good a range of price information.

It will be interesting to see how the site continues to grow and how the guys handle the tough task of trying to get up to date pricing information out of smaller, non-chain, stores.

That having been said, even if they continue as is, there’s huge value in what they’re doing.