On the Web, reviews are the voices of the consumers. Despite a multi-million dollars advertising campaign, if a product is not well-acclaimed on consumer-opinions Websites, sales will never tear the roof off. It’s the democratic aspect of the Web.
Consumer reviews’ Websites have empowered the consumer in many ways: it catapulted businesses into an era of transparency and attention to customers’ satisfaction. On the other hand, consumer reviews Websites have never truly empowered the reviewers that provide the juice to their Websites: reviews belong to the site’s owners, no internal structure makes it easy for reviewers to meet one another, and no consumer reviews Website opens up its database to third-party developers.
RateItAll launches its V3 version of RateItAll today. RateItAll first launched its service in 1999, and after almost 10 years of community development, the startup got funds to power a fresh new start.
In a few words (in order not to repeat what the video already mentions), V3 has 5 main new components:
- A fresh new design.
- The site is now a hybrid between Facebook and Delicious, allowing you to follow people, new category items, and keywords. All the items appear on your user’s homepage.
- Creating a new review became even simpler and more accessible.
- The social gaming dimension that matches users’ tastes together is more prominent with the new design.
- A full read/write API is now accessible for third-party developers. Developers can pull any item they wish from the RateItAll’s database, and the rev share model can also transit through the RIA’s programmable infrastructure. Developers can also use the API to power their own custom-built review widgets (even though it’s a little heavy on the javascript so far).
By being innovative, RateItAll gets back in the competition of consumer reviews providers. Other service providers should find an obvious interest in powering their Websites with the RateItAll technology: fully-customizable content, two-way information infrastructure, revenue plan, widgets, and a vibrant community on RateItAll that’s been crunching reviews for the past ten years.