Ready To Rate Something Again?

It is usually much easier to choose exactly what you need when available offers are supported by recommendations of friends or even strangers. This approach is growing widely popular online - we are encouraged to rate, recommend, comment and review virtually everything. The recently launched RatePoint enables you to rate anything - websites, services, products, solutions - at least everything with a URL.

Caroline McCarthy from Webware was the first to mention similarities between the newly launched social recommendations website and Digg. And yes, RatePoint's features are really similar to those of Digg - with several clear distinctions. First of all, RatePoint makes voting much more difficult: instead of simply voting up and down (showing your positive or negative opinion) you will need to rate something on a scale from 1 to 5. You can even have your rating supported by comments - named "Gabs" here (but this is optional).

Sure, here it takes more time and effort to rate something than with Digg. But still it sounds more like an advantage for RatePoint - I doubt that those users who are not particularly interested or familiar with the topic reviewed will stay here and participate in the process just for the sake of clicking.

Another definite advantage is that you can also create groups of users: you can add users whose opinion means a lot to you (or, vice versa, is usually opposed to yours). These groups will be used by RatePoint when it recommends something for you. The website will also recommend "clones" for you - other users with similar tastes (How about having a clone just for yourself?).

Possibly this new approach will help RatePoint avoid at least some of the Digg's problems, like manipulating votes by a small number of users. But if CNET Networks journalist predicts that a startup "could potentially succeed", the first thing the website does is going down for several hours at least. So by the time I finished writing this piece it was down - and I'm leaving it as a draft to be published for you as soon as it's up and running again.