Rate Your Credit Card

Let's all pile on the credit card industry when they're down.

We've added a pretty comprehensive database of cards for credit card reviews to our site - find your card(s) and rate it (them)!

One more plug for the RateItAll Toolbar for Firefox

I am loving the RateItAll toolbar for Firefox. I love it so much that I abandoned the new Google browser, Chrome, and came back to Firefox 3 - just so I could use the toolbar.

I use the toolbar to 1) rate sites (and add them to ria) as I browse around the web; 2) directly access my reviews and my network's reviews; and 3) search RIA from anywhere.

If you use Firefox and haven't yet taken the toolbar for a spin, why not try it out? Click here to download it.

Some Changes to Search

For the last several years, we have been using a third party search service to deliver search results on RateItAll.  They did a pretty good job, but there were a couple of problems:

- There was a one day lag in new things showing up in the search results

- Their search engine was a general search engine that had been tweaked to try and meet our needs - it was not build from the ground up specifically for RateItAll.

- The search results were hosted on a third party site, causing a very slight delay 

No longer.

Our newest engineer, Jonathan, has built a site search engine for RateItAll that is better and faster than what we had before:

- There are no more lags.  If you add a new page (weblist, review, item) to the site, it will immediately be reachable via search.

- Search is rocket fast now - no bouncing back results from a third party site

- Search quality is better - because this search engine has been built for RIA, I think you'll find that the results are a bit better.

Please hammer away on the search engine and let me know if you see anything screwy.

Social Media Poem

A guy named Greg K. has written a poem about web 2.0 / social media - pretty clever, no?:

I’M PRETTY WELL CONNECTED

(a Web 2.0 poem)

By

Gregory K.

I’m pretty well connected:

Facebook’s got my face.

I AIM and blog.

Of course I vlog.

Come see me at MySpace.

I Flickr, and I Twitter.

I wiki and Squidoo!

I’m Live. I Ning.

I’m there on Xing.

I’m really LinkedIn, too.

I Hulu, Yelp, and Google.

My YouTube channel’s hot.

I share Goodreads,

Have many feeds,

And Digg and link a lot.

Second Life and Classmates?

Xanga? RateItAll?

I’m on those four

And dozens more

Plus some I can’t recall.

I’m pretty well connected:

My friends are EVERYWHERE.

I bet I’d meet

Them on the street…

If I’d just leave my chair.

RateItAll Toolbar for Firefox

We've just launched a neat Firefox toolbar for RateItAll.  If you are a Firefox user, you can take it for a spin HERE.

Going from left to right on the toolbar, here's what each button does:

Read Reviews Button:

As you browse the web, the Read Reviews button will turn yellow if RateItAll has reviews of the site.  This is helpful if you are, say, thinking about buying something at an ecommerce site that you haven't used before.  If you see the "Read Reviews" button light up, you can check out reviews from other folks that may have used the site before by clicking on the button.  If it doesn't light up, it means that noone has reviewed that site yet.

Search Button and Search Box

The search box and button does exactly what you might think - it lets you search RateItAll's database from anywhere on the Web.  Clicking "search" will pop open a new tab on your browser and display results from RateItAll.

Rate This Site Button

This is my favorite button on the toolbar.  As you browse the web, this button lets you rate and review whatever website that you are on.  Clicking the Rate This Site button pops open a new browser tab, and takes you to the right page on RateItAll to rate the site.

And here's where it gets neat - if RateItAll doesn't already have the site in its database, it directs you to the new item submission page on RateItAll, with our best guess as to the proper information already populated into the page (web site name, web site url, web site description, etc.).   

This tool is for rating domains (e.g. CNN.com), not rating individual articles or pages within a domain (e.g. CNN.com/wall-street-collapse).

My Reviews and Friends' Reviews

The My Reviews and Friends' Reviews buttons do exactly what you might think.  They take you directly to the pages where you can view your own review archive, as well as recent reviews from your network.  On RateItAll.com, you have to click a couple of different links to get to these pages... I find it's really helpful to be able to access them with one click.

Inbox

The Inbox link takes you directly to your RateItAll inbox where you can check messages from other reviewers.

Sign Out / Sign In and Home

Sign Out and Sign In are self explanatory.  Home takes you to RateItAll.com.  And clicking the little drop down takes you to important RateItAll pages like Recent Reviews and Hall of Fame.

Many thanks to RateItAll programmer Alexander for building this cool new toy!

Eventually we will get to building something similar for Internet Explorer.

Google Case Study

Our friends at Google have written a nice case study about how RateItAll uses AdSense for revenue sharing.  Check it out.  My favorite quote comes from some guy named Lawrence Coburn:

“Treating your users fairly is not only the right thing to do – it’s also good for business.”

Date-Able App for Facebook

Aileen, RateItAll's awesome intern, has built an application for Facebook around dating called Date-Able.  There are a bunch of dating related quizzes on there that will help you find (or avoid) that special (or unspecial) someone.

Facebook users can click through to add the Date-Able app.

Oh yeah, if you have ideas for more apps or quizzes, talk to Aileen.

What Browsers Do We Use?

A new browser from Google launched this week called Chrome.  There are already some pretty good Google Chrome reviews on the site.

So it got me thinking.... which browsers does the RIA community prefer?  Well, here's a snapshot of yesterday's activity:

IE is still the big fish here, but I find it impressive that Chrome accounted for 1% of all visits yesterday.

Here is RateItAll's ranking of top browsers:

Check out RateItAll