Toronto DemoCamp13

After attending my first DemoCamp (number 12) and seeing the other very technologically knowledgeable attendees, I knew that this would be a great venue to talk about ProductWiki. Just a little bit of background, DemoCamp is an informal get together of tech enthusiasts, designers, etc where certain people get to present something that brings value to the audience.

I contacted David Crow, one of the organizers, to see if I could present ProductWiki at the next meetup (numero 13), and we were selected to present, woo! Now that presenters are given a earnest 5 minutes of face time, we're all required to write a blog post answering the 6 main questions that the community wants to know. Well here they are!

Have you attended a previous DemoCamp?
Yes, DemoCamp12

Who are you? Previous experience, what makes you qualified for us to listen to, etc.
I'm cofounder and CTO of ProductWiki. We've been working on this for 2 years now and received attention from a variety of media outlets including popular bloggers such as Mark Evans. And the fact that I'm good looking helps.

What does your product do?
ProductWiki is attempting to create a comprehensive resource for high quality product information. Using the power of the community, and volunteer contributions we want ProductWiki to house FREE product information: FREE from bias, FREE from baseless marketing speak, FREE to use by anybody for anything, FREE from the noise of clutter and spam, FREE from editorial red tape so that it always improves and stays relevant.

What hard problem, interesting insight, or cool feature will you be demonstrating?
The project of creating a high quality, comprehensive resource for product information is an incredibly daunting task. Information-wise: what is a product? What is high quality information? How do you have the benefits of many bits of information without being overwhelmed by the noise?

An example of an innovation that came out of answering this question is the collaborative review system, where many people can come together and review a product individually while creating one authoritative review. This is an example of what I like to call Accordion Information.

What are you hoping to get out of presenting?
Feedback and advice on how to communicate our message and techniques on how to identify the right people that can become a core part of the project. Also (and I know this is sales pitchy), if ONE person is able to see our vision and how it'll effect the world, and becomes a contributor, then it'll be worth it.

What does the community gain by hearing you present?
What is Accordion Information and what are its benefits relative to other kinds of information systems (especially the user generated kind).

Learn from our experiences in growing a community and that it's all about the core people.

Get people to appreciate the problem of low quality product information, and the possibilities that come about when high quality information is FREELY available.

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.