Web 2.0 Blog

If you’re like me when shopping online, you’ll spend ages reading product reviews before buying a product. These reviews have a tremendous influence over my desicion whether to buy an item or not - sometimes more so than the price. It frustrates me when I can’t see the feedback of a product on sites such as Amazon or Play.com because no one has bothered to write a review for it.

Startup product review site Test Freaks is a fantastic idea for a website. It is essentially a haven for critics to express their opinions on products they have bought, and for shoppers to get an idea about their product’s qualities (and lack of) from previous buyers, before a purchase is made. Often the manufacturer’s description isn’t enough - they’re obviously going to heap praise onto their products!

I was very impresed with the usability of the site, and I really like how the search function gives you both product and category matches as you type into the bar - a very neat touch.

The product page gives you a heap of useful information from reviews, ratings (expert and user), a gallery, pros and cons, and impressively, links to websites on the Internet where the product is being sold at the best prices.

A couple of issues I had with the site was the fact that a product I was looking for (a popular Sony TV) wasn’t in the database. I guess you can’t expect everything to be there, but certainly in order for this to be a huge success, users must feel they can depend on it for any product.

Another small issue I felt was the design. While very usable, I felt the colour scheme of dark oranges and greens, and lack of excitement generated from quite a basic layout didn’t do justice to the qualities of the service. It makes the site look quite home-made rather than a serious commercial application. I think a white/grey + blue or red colour scheme similar to that of their competitors Pricerunner would be a step in the right direction.

Overall though, I was very impressed with the amount of reviewers on the site and the catalog of products that are on there. It does what you want it to and deserves to be very successful. While on the subject of reviews, I’d give it 5 stars. *****

I came across Profy today and it really impressed me. It claims to be an ‘all-in-one’ blogging platform, a haven for bloggers if you like, where a combination of blog posting, social networking and feed reading is combined into one easy-to-use platform. Having watched the demo, it certainly does look easy to use and this leads on from my previous post about who uses social bookmarking. My concerns of casual Internet users being able to use such features were founded on lack of purpose to uses them and lack of mass documentation describing what they are and how to use them.

The platform consists of four main areas:

• Simple blogging platform where you can choose from a variety of templates, modify the layout and add HTML/JavaScript
• Social bookmarking and sharing tags and favourites amongst other bloggers in the community
• A place for social networking - interacting with other user’s profiles including discussion boards and instant messaging
• An RSS feed reader platform which storing any number of RSS feeds from external sites

Profy Dashboard

Ultimately, this is another example of a nice piece of user-friendly Web 2.0 software which can get pretty much anyone involved with social networking, blogging and sharing, all in one place. But how will people know about it, and will it ever have the power and publicity to overthrow giants like Blogger and Facebook. I wouldn’t be so confident. But as a Web 2.0 startup, it shows promising signs for a potentially large userbase and with the right promotion it could introduce these terrific Web 2.0 technologies to a generation of casual users.

One of the drawbacks of the current blogging platform is the fact that the content displayed on the page is static - it won’t update until you tell it to, by revisiting the page or refreshing the browser. Static content is also a feature of discussion boards and forums which is why it can be difficult to have flowing conversations, especially when posts are made simultaneously. ScribbleLive rewrites the ules of this publishing platform by offering its users the ability to view and manipulate live data over a network.

ScribbleLive was given special recognition at Canada’s Mesh Conference of the latest web technologies. Two advantages of this is the ability to transmit live data to viewers, with no reloading necessary. This type of communication could be ideal for broadcasting on a global scale, using a well designed platform to broadcast information. Conferences, demonstrations and up to the minute updates within communities would all be possible. Another advantage is the fact that it is written with Ajax, making it a perfect scrolling information service on mobile devices such as the iPhone.

The main requirement for this is participants however. There needs to be a decent community of users to be able to make this worthwhile, so it may take a while before this takes off and possibly replaces the standard blogging format. People can be aprehensive about changing from what they know, particularly when communities already exist.

I wanted to let you know about a new version of italki.com which was just relaunched.  italki.com is a language learning social network, and openeducation website. The premise is very good as users from all of the world collaborate together to help each other learn languages. It also utilizes the mashup methodology very well by integrating Facebook profiles into its system, allowing you to share files & resources and meet up with other Facebook users to form groups.

With the new version, users can now collaborate on creating free language learning textbooks (in addition to finding language partners, having their foreign language questions answered, and joining groups for language learning). At this point, italki.com is one of the larger websites in the language learning / education 2.0 space.  italki now has over 200,000 users around the world, and has been growing briskly since its launch in December 2006.

I think this is a very good example of how Web 2.0 Internet technologies can bring people together from around the world to help each other. It needn’t stop at language learning however, it could be rolled out into any form of e-learning. Using similar types of mashups people could explore the laws of trigonometry, discuss Shakespere literature or learn about other places in the world in the same way. I bet similar services are already available but they should be made more well known and accessible to all users. The vast amounts of casual Internet users who use sites like Facebook would be a good place to find users.