2 months in the trenches
If you haven't been to ProductWiki in the past little while then go there www.productwiki.com. Now! Check it out! It's great! We just released a new update on Monday that introduces a bunch of new features. For the full details check out the notes on the site. In this post I'm going to run through some of the major changes and talk about why we did them.
Before getting into the details, here's a sample of some of the buzz that's been generating.
Download Squad - a very positive assessment of the site that appreciates the unbiased and comprehensive nature of the information
Maple Leaf 2.0 - an indepth interview with Erik, discussing the history of our site and the new features.
Mashable
Emily Chang's eHub
The Collaborative Review system is something we're super excited about, and it looks like it's already a success. Community members of the site probably already know that there was no formal review system with stars and all of that. There's the tapping system and you can always write reviews in the comments, discussions or as an article, but nothing like Epinions or Amazon's reviews. This is actually very deliberate on our part, we did have one of those systems working before we launched in 2005. But even back then we knew there were problems and so didn't include it as part of the site.
Though we didn't have an advanced review system we never stopped thinking about product reviews and how to do them properly. In fact I even wrote a pretty lengthy article examining the problem with video game reviews. Looking at expert reviews I saw that a lot of them contained the same information, a big hunk of text devoted towards describing the product, with some superfluous information thrown in, and the useful opinions at the end. User reviews, the good ones, followed the same model. The short user reviews are useful but you have to read a lot of them to build up a comprehensive picture of the product. Lastly, the most important parts of the reviews are the ending pros and cons where people say what benefits the product brings to their life, and the cons which are the aspects of the product that should be improved. What ends up happening is you read a ton of reviews and start building a list inside of your head.
Eureka!
Let's just do this FOR people explicitly. This helps the person writing the review, and the person reading the review. When you're writing the review you don't have to reinvent the wheel and come up with points that already exist, if someone has already added that pro or con, then just agree with them! Or disagree if you experienced something different. And for researchers now you have the convenience of reading one review while getting the confidence and coverage that many people's perspectives can bring. And if you still want to see how an individual feels we need to have that as well since it's still useful for a lot of people. Combine the best of both worlds.
It all sounded nice in theory, but now that we've launched and seen people use the system, it looks like the reality is following what we thought would happen. Which is great! Because as anyone in software development knows, the way you THINK people will use a service is often different than how they ACTUALLY do.
The second major new feature we added is OpenID support. When we first learned about OpenID it was kind of confusing, I mean what the heck does a "decentralized, distributed identity system" mean anyway? But after wading through the technical mumbo jumbo it turns out to be a pretty simple concept. All it is, is that you have a login account with one website which gives you a name, and then you use that name on other websites that support OpenID and that's it.
Simple right?
Heck, after dealing with some poor technical issues and documentation, supporting OpenID on our end wasn't that big of a deal either. The biggest annoyance was the lack of a proper testing server that we could experiment against, instead it was 'try this'... nothing happens 'try something else'... nothing happens. Which can have a dramatic impact on development times! Overall we're extremely happy with OpenID. I was skeptical going into it, but after getting it working and using it internally I started to appreciate how easy it all worked. So far it's been a success. Quite a few of the new sign-ups are OpenID people. And considering the OpenID folk are usually the ones that like to try out new technologies, I say welcome!
We've also incorporated some other features into the site that should improve the overall experience. A couple included some functionality that the community has requested including being able to filter your user list by product category, and deleting your own comments.
It's been a long and busy road so we'll chill out on the hardcore coding for a while and focus on community building. We hope you enjoy everything we've worked on, and as always if there are any questions, suggestions or concerns let us know!
An important note: we're looking for some moderators, so if you're interested shoot me, Erik or Amanie an e-mail and we'll start that process.
Before getting into the details, here's a sample of some of the buzz that's been generating.
Download Squad - a very positive assessment of the site that appreciates the unbiased and comprehensive nature of the information
Maple Leaf 2.0 - an indepth interview with Erik, discussing the history of our site and the new features.
Mashable
Emily Chang's eHub
The Collaborative Review system is something we're super excited about, and it looks like it's already a success. Community members of the site probably already know that there was no formal review system with stars and all of that. There's the tapping system and you can always write reviews in the comments, discussions or as an article, but nothing like Epinions or Amazon's reviews. This is actually very deliberate on our part, we did have one of those systems working before we launched in 2005. But even back then we knew there were problems and so didn't include it as part of the site.
Though we didn't have an advanced review system we never stopped thinking about product reviews and how to do them properly. In fact I even wrote a pretty lengthy article examining the problem with video game reviews. Looking at expert reviews I saw that a lot of them contained the same information, a big hunk of text devoted towards describing the product, with some superfluous information thrown in, and the useful opinions at the end. User reviews, the good ones, followed the same model. The short user reviews are useful but you have to read a lot of them to build up a comprehensive picture of the product. Lastly, the most important parts of the reviews are the ending pros and cons where people say what benefits the product brings to their life, and the cons which are the aspects of the product that should be improved. What ends up happening is you read a ton of reviews and start building a list inside of your head.
Eureka!
Let's just do this FOR people explicitly. This helps the person writing the review, and the person reading the review. When you're writing the review you don't have to reinvent the wheel and come up with points that already exist, if someone has already added that pro or con, then just agree with them! Or disagree if you experienced something different. And for researchers now you have the convenience of reading one review while getting the confidence and coverage that many people's perspectives can bring. And if you still want to see how an individual feels we need to have that as well since it's still useful for a lot of people. Combine the best of both worlds.
It all sounded nice in theory, but now that we've launched and seen people use the system, it looks like the reality is following what we thought would happen. Which is great! Because as anyone in software development knows, the way you THINK people will use a service is often different than how they ACTUALLY do.
The second major new feature we added is OpenID support. When we first learned about OpenID it was kind of confusing, I mean what the heck does a "decentralized, distributed identity system" mean anyway? But after wading through the technical mumbo jumbo it turns out to be a pretty simple concept. All it is, is that you have a login account with one website which gives you a name, and then you use that name on other websites that support OpenID and that's it.
Simple right?
Heck, after dealing with some poor technical issues and documentation, supporting OpenID on our end wasn't that big of a deal either. The biggest annoyance was the lack of a proper testing server that we could experiment against, instead it was 'try this'... nothing happens 'try something else'... nothing happens. Which can have a dramatic impact on development times! Overall we're extremely happy with OpenID. I was skeptical going into it, but after getting it working and using it internally I started to appreciate how easy it all worked. So far it's been a success. Quite a few of the new sign-ups are OpenID people. And considering the OpenID folk are usually the ones that like to try out new technologies, I say welcome!
We've also incorporated some other features into the site that should improve the overall experience. A couple included some functionality that the community has requested including being able to filter your user list by product category, and deleting your own comments.
It's been a long and busy road so we'll chill out on the hardcore coding for a while and focus on community building. We hope you enjoy everything we've worked on, and as always if there are any questions, suggestions or concerns let us know!
An important note: we're looking for some moderators, so if you're interested shoot me, Erik or Amanie an e-mail and we'll start that process.
Labels: community, development, openid, productwiki, update
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