This week’s TuesdayPush is Whose View, …
This week’s Tuesday Push is Whose View, a review site that supposedly works with your trusted network of friends. Initial impressions are; nice design but do we need yet another restaurant review site? It is also only available in Dublin which is frustrating for those of us outside of the big smoke who want to populate websites with local data. You can browse most of the site without logging in and there seems to be a fair amount of data already in it. To review though you need to go through a registration process that would rival visiting North Korea. Worryingly the sign-up process has a bunch of email newsletter options pre-selected. Leaving them ticked earns you points. These points are “redeemable against special offers” posted by businesses to the site. The site also wants your date of birth and gender, nice demographic information for them but of no value for me to provide. You have to confirm your email address before you get the social-network integration which seems to only work with email providers, not Facebook, Twitter etc. GMail has oAuth but WhoseView wants my username and password. Not going to happen. By now I have forgotten why I am on the site or what restaurant I wanted to review. But they don’t call me Peristent Paul for nothing and I wend my way to the Ukiyo page. Reviews can have titles, descriptions, tags, images, videos, stars, ponies and kittens. One nice touch is 0 stars is a rant while 5 stars is a rave, handy for weeding out the extreme reviews that are worth nothing. The rest of the site is quite massive really. Guides, related reviews, Amazon style “people who reviewed this also reviewed” lists and so on. Offers are also a big part of the system though I’ve never been one to choose restaurants based on offers. This is all in contrast to Grab My Table which requires no registration, titles, tags and focuses on beautiful restaurant pages with simple reviews. It looks like Whose View spent a lot of time and effort building the site and getting initial data but getting into it and reaping value takes time and effort for the user. I also worry that this is yet another review site that may or may not go viral and with locked-in data. Recreating social-networks and adding on reviews, or anything, is not the way to go anymore. Honestly, they’ve done a professional job and I’d hire the coders and designers but I just don’t see myself remembering never mind returing to Whose View in a week or two. ยง
Tuesday Push - Whoseview.com | Dave Concannon 9:19 am on August 5, 2009 Permalink |
[...] still pushing, and the only review I could find for yesterday’s Tuesday Push is by Paul Watson. Get off your [...]
michael 12:03 am on August 6, 2009 Permalink |
Hi Paul
thank you for taking the time to review our site and appreciate the constructive feedback. The site is very much in beta and all feedback is welcomed. I am glad you like the design of the site and our developers will be very happy with your comments.
However as you know it’s really about usability, value and stickiness. When we opened the site on July 17th, we quickly realised that the log in process needed to be addressed. Therefore we very much take on board your comments here and expect to see some improvements over the coming weeks.
Therefore once we overcome this hurdle, hopefully we can demonstrate value. We have indeed spent alot of time building the site, a year to be exact with small team. We believe that a review based website to work requires key elements – trust and quality content. On the trust element, we have spent considerable time building the social aspects of the site so the browser can get a feel for who the reviewer is, their level of activity and trustworthiness. Without trust and objectivity, a site like this will not work or go viral. I feel that many of the relatively new review sites fail in this regard.
On the content side, we have spent time also populating the site with existing directory information, as having to add a business often deters poeple from posting a review. For us it’s the social element overlaying existing directory content that will enhance the user experience as social recommendation is clearly the driving force in search.
we are new and will be evolving over the coming months as we fine tune our offering. Members review content will also become more easily exportable as we add a few more open features to the content.
I would love if you could come back at end of September and review the site again? Thanks again for your feedback paul.
Kind Rgs
Michael
Co-founder
http://www.whoseview.com
paulmwatson 12:37 pm on August 11, 2009 Permalink
I’ll definitely give it another go over the coming weeks, thanks Michael.
Lightbox Blog » Tuesday Push helping Whoseview get exposure 12:03 pm on August 11, 2009 Permalink |
[...] Tuesday Push has been good to Whoseview this week and a number of people have written about the site. Today was the turn of Silicon Republic which we hope will get the site viewed by a [...]
Mick 9:20 am on September 11, 2009 Permalink |
Hi Paul
Just to follow up from last post to say we have greatly reduced our sign up process and Facebook Connect is being added next week after weeks of development. We have also overhauled the WhoseView.ie page. Thanks again for tip as brought to head the need to amend sign up. Rgs Michael
Whoseview.com has implemented a much sim… « Paul M. Watson 1:07 pm on September 18, 2009 Permalink |
[...] 1:07 pm on September 18, 2009 Reply Tags: ireland (134), web (604) Whoseview.com has implemented a much simpler and better sign-up process, including Facebook Connect support. Good job lads. [...]