There are a lot of t-shirt blogs. Like spurned Paris Hilton BFF’s, they dot the landscape with their naked ambition (ironic, since they discuss clothing). One of those sites, however, has come up with something above and beyond trite reviews. Last week Buy-Tees.net announced its t-shirt toolbar.

The toolbar is currently available for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. When I gave it a try install was fairly easy. I was tickled to discover that ‘MilitantGeek’ was linked to from the “Reviews” drop down. Unfortunately, things started going downhill from there.

Upon restarting my browser I spent a few minutes scrutinizing the detailed setup options – make sure to spend time here otherwise your default search queries will be discovering tees instead of Google results. It also defaults to broadcasting usage statistics and changing your homepage so pay attention if that would be a concern. Another annoyance after installation is that the toolbar continued to ask me for a username and password for “FeedBurner feed T-shirtReviewsBlog”.

Canceling that I gave the search a try. I expected that typing in ‘Geek’ into the t-shirt bar would result in a list of “Geek” t-shirts. Instead a web page with the typical Google results appeared with nothing related to apparel appearing on the first page of results. Tweaking a bit I discovered that I had to select whether I wanted searches to run against “PleaseDressMe” or “ShirtSeek” results – which wasn’t much more of a time saver than going to those sites directly.

The “Tee Feeds” section is nice but doesn’t aggregate anything that I haven’t already added to my own feed reader; and if I’m going to read feeds I want them all in one place. In fact, unlike a dedicated feed reader here I can’t delete a t-shirt feed I’m not interested in. Likewise, if I should discover a great shirt site I’d like to add to the toolbar RSS its not readily obvious on how to do that (if at all). The integrated chat is actually just a link to an online chat room that, at the time I was writing this, was empty. The “t-shirt resources” button is yet more links and the “t-shirt videos” links back to the Buy Tees site.

I can see where something like this might be useful – if you enjoy having a ton of thematic links together in one place. However, understand that the toolbar is just that – links – to other services. It doesn’t provide anything that isn’t already available elsewhere online. The question then becomes whether its worth the screen real estate that it consumes. Your answers may vary.