Where user views really count
Most user generated content is completely banal garbage. Look at Twitter. I really don’t care if someone in Santa Clara just bought a latte, I mean, surely even that person’s friends couldn’t care either.
However the views of previous customers are a fantastic way of assessing a product. Amazon probably started it, but now I’d never book a hotel without checking Trip Advisor first. Of course you have to discount the gushing and the excessively grumbly comment, but you can spot the trends. If everyone is relatively happy with their stay, that’s great.
I also checked a restaurant in London once, as I had web access from the hotel. The reviews were spot on, although I can’t remember the name of the site.
However nobody seems to be doing this particularly prominently by mobile, even though it’s the obvious vehicle. Where I have seen it, it tends to get lumped in with social networking or location based services, whereas I think it’s a great flagship product in its own right.
As ever promoting such a service is difficult, but you’d expect hotel and restaurant owners to encourage positive reviewing. Maybe there’s a need for a Rate Me service? Maybe that’s a short code opportunity.
(And yes, rateme.com is a hot-or-not service that, at time of checking, was not running.)
June 15th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
I have recently started using twitter and I must say it’s actually quite good. I didn’t really understand it at first, had no idea how it was to be used or indeed how people were using it… but I quickly came to realise that it is simply a cross-media message delivery system which means I can send a text message when I’m on the bus, have an IM bot (my bot) pick up on it and alert everybody concerned in whatever way they want to hear about it (e-mail, RSS, iCal/gCal calendar item). Or I can use it to tell everybody that i just ate some toast, but that doesn’t go down so well.
I think there is a lot of potential for twitter and I can see it really taking off in the next year. There are already a fewer “killer apps”, like the timer friend, who will remind you about items at a set time in the future, or as a more lazy “I’m working on X” system. That’s incredibly valuable for the likes of (old school) collaboration, as it saves having to ask “which file are you editing?”. I know all these things can be implemented as their own service, but twitter allows them all to coexist on the same platform, without any need to worry about the media that is sending or delivering the updates.
Dan and Hannu have been using it as a new media for storytelling. There is the concept of an espresso story (26 words), which is perfect for twitter… or some people have even set it up to read books, one sentence at a time.
That said, I’ve mostly been using it for micro-blogging like letting my friends know I’d quite fancy a game of multiplayer freeciv.
June 17th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Espresso Story = Haiku for the Starbucks generation?
Can’t say I get see timers and source code control as being killer apps. And reading books one sentence at a time will mangle any narrative feel and would, frankly, drive me mad. Not to mention the sheer cost of it, if delivered via SMS.
What it comes down to is that it’s a low bandwidth, low reliability message switching system. By low reliability I mean that it’s dependent on low-reliability services like SMS, not that the service itself is unreliable.