Posts Tagged with ‘epinions’

I've been stewing over a post by Mike Mason at his blog Agile Thinking for a couple of days. I make no secret of the fact that I come at this whole writing about tech thing from the perspective of a former developer, so when he titles at post “Startups: Fire Your Dev Teams” you tend to sit up and take notice.
And most of the folks who are commenting on his piece certainly did just that.
However, even as a former [...]

This shopping holiday season is a time when new shopping sites start popping up everywhere. How do you tell the good from the bad? We already reviewed a product review / shopping site that fell short of the mark, so we were happy to see Snoopr pop up on our radar.
According to the creators of Snoopr, this is the second generation of their site. They added several new features in a bid to become a [...]

Profy was recently invited to try the invitation only beta of TestFreaks , a new product information aggregator brought to you by the creators of the original PriceRunner (now owned by ValueClick). I have been a long time user of Web 1.0 product information and recommendation behemoth, Epinions. That made me excited to try out the “new kid on the block” and see how times have changed.
Although I was underwhelmed by the overall experience, I do have to give them [...]

I'm an old-school blogger. I'll say that right up front. I truly believe that in order to have any believability as a blogger, I have to be completely honest in my writing. The idea of getting paid to write a review BY a company pimping a product doesn't mesh well with that mentality.
Don't get me wrong; I still write product reviews for sites like Epinions where you might make a few dollars on a review if you are LUCKY, but [...]

Are we reaching over-saturation for Web 2.0 apps? It seems like 100 new apps are launched every day, but at least 99 of those are something we've already seen before. In this category falls Living Memory , the latest entrant in the family social networking space.
I'm going to be blunt; the site design is overly busy and kludgy. It may be that I'm just used to the usual clean designs of Web 2.0 sites with lots of white space and [...]

I'm sure that most people have heard about the brouhaha over at Digg yesterday, but if not, the BBC News has fairly unbiased synopsis of what happened. Mine, I'm sure, will be much less unbiased. The entire Digg community seems pretty proud of themselves today, having shown "The Man" who was boss, and crowing about the news coverage that the stunt has generated.
What really happened, however, was that a mob overtook an online community to suit their own purposes. And [...]

A month ago, I took a look at PowerReviews, which at the time was still in private beta. Since then, they've made a lot of changes to the site, changed the name to Buzzillions , and done a soft beta launch, with the big push coming next Tuesday.
In an email to private beta users, Jim Morris, VP of Customer Experience explained many of the changes:

"too busy, too many links" - We streamlined the home page, reorganized the categories, [...]

With the explosion in social networking comes a risk. The more you put out there online about yourself, the more potential there is for risk to your privacy and personal reputation. From blog comments to revenge ratings to angry retaliatory comments, almost anything can end up visible in a Google search. Employers are already using Google to find out additional information about prospective employees, and recent news about the law school admissions forum AutoAdmit revealed that Internet harassment of board [...]

As a long-time Epinions member and contributor, I was skeptical of any new review sites. After all, with the affiliation with eBay and Shopping.com, Epinions seems to have cornered the market on consumer reviews, utilizing a community for content creation and peer ratings when Web 2.0 was a mere twinkle in Tim O'Reilly's eye. In addition, since the inception of Epinions, most online retailers have implemented consumer reviews on their own sites, so why would another really be necessary?
A quick pass [...]