Related Lists

Last week, we quietly launched a neat new feature that displays topically related lists on our most popular list pages. The goal is pretty simple - to provide an additional way to discover high quality, entertaining / helpful lists related to the one you are browsing.

For example, on the Mexican Beer list, you will now see a module called "Related Lists" in the upper right hand side. In this module, you can see links to lists like our main Beer Reviews section, the list of drinking games, a list of Mexico Attractions, and our Tequila Ratings section.

This feature is part automated, and part manual. We are rolling it out slowly to high traffic lists on the site, so keep your eyes out for it.

Have a Blackberry, Pre, or an iPhone? You can now post reviews on the go.

One other aspect of our reviews@rateitall.com feature that we haven't really mentioned - this is a baby step towards making RateItAll a mobile service.

If you have email on your phone, you can now post reviews just by sending an email to reviews@rateitall.com.

Somebody has already figured this out:

Some Coverage for reviews@rateitall.com

Here are some links to some coverage and more information on our new reviews@rateitall.com feature:

TechCrunch

HyveUp

Press Release

Twitter Stream

reviews@rateitall.com FAQ page

Major Product Announcement

For the last few weeks, there have been whispers around RIA-land of an important new feature - the ability to post reviews, instantly, via email.

We have just released this feature publicly.

There are two ways to post your reviews via email.

1) The easy way. Look for the "email your review" link on any RateItAll item page. It looks like this:


2) The easier way. Email your review to reviews@rateitall.com

Here's how:



That's it. Of course, you can also attach images to your emailed reviews, and the resizing and formatting happens automagically.

Believe it or not, it was very, very hard to make this feature so easy to use.

Please help us out by hammering on this feature a bit. Send feedback to feedback@rateitall.com (it blasts out to the whole team this way).

Help us choose RateItAll's Next Feature

Last Friday, the RateItAll team departed the hallowed halls of RIA Global HQ and Campus, and got on the Bart train for the Carnelian Room - a magnificent restaurant and meeting facility in downtown San Francisco located on the 52nd floor of one of the city's tallest buildings.

The goal was to get offsite for a day, unplug from the daily grind, and talk about what we wanted to be as a website and as a company.

The venue was stunning - we were literally in the clouds, up above even the Transamerica Building, with views of Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Coit Tower.

During the afternoon, we had a session where we went around the table and came up with every idea for "small tweaks" to the site that we felt would make the site better for folks trying to use the site - whether they be writers, readers, businesses, or advertisers.

The session was done in a game format. Each person had 10 seconds to come up with an idea, or be eliminated. The winner got a package of Astronaut Ice Cream (and the loser got a package of Astronaut Ice Cream). Those who came in second, third, and fourth, also got packages of Astronaut Ice Cream.

The output of this meeting of the minds was this list of 82 suggested RateItAll site tweaks. Please rate them based on your opinion of their Priority. 5 = highest priority.

The Return of Featured Lists

Numbah posted an interesting review the other day regarding v3 list discovery that we talked about for a while here at the RateItAll Global HQ Compound and Campus:

Its hard to break out into new topics at times, like you're stuck...

And then Twansalem chimed in as follows:

So I'm not the only one who feels like V3 is telling me what to rate? Magellan had previously referred to the feed as the river, and it sure feels like a river to me. Easy to navigate if you want to go where it's taking you, but hard to buck the current if you don't. In the previous version, it seemed a lot easier to just go rate something else. But a couple of days ago when it seemed like all anyone was talking about was either gay marriage or the economic stimulus package, I got bored and just took a couple days off from RIA. I don't think I would have done that with the older version.

We've also heard chatter from other site heavyweights that the Featured Lists (and also the Hottest Lists and New Stuff pages) were missed in V3 as jump off points.

Well, Featured Lists are now back. You can see them on your home page, in the sidebar.

Please keep the feedback coming. We're listening.

Two New Features!

Guys, we just launched two cool new features.

The first is our "Friend Finder" feature - this lets you use your email address book from sites like Gmail, Yahoo, and LinkedIn to find folks you know who are already on RateItAll. It also lets you invite friends who are not already on RateItAll to join your trusted network. You can try out this feature HERE (and it's also on the main navigation bar for now under "Friend Finder.")

It's a really easy way to add people that you may know in real life to your Trusted Network on RIA - I just added about 70 people who I had no idea were on the site. It's also a great way to invite new people to the site.

The second feature is an alert email when someone adds you to their trusted network. This email is sent from messaging@rateitall.com so you'll need to make sure that email address is whitelisted if you have a spam filter AND that email address that you're using for your RateItAll account is current.

No more analyzing friend networks to see who just added you.... Enjoy!

Speed Rating Just Got a Lot Better

I think that Speed Rating is one of the better developments on RateItAll in recent months. But one thing that really bugged me - if you clicked "skip" on an item that you didn't know, it would eventually feed you the item again.... sometimes almost immediately.

Well, we've fixed this. If you skip an item while speed rating, you will not see that item for the rest of your session.

This also applies to our compatibility tests on Facebook. Hopefully, this will eliminate reviews like this one.

BTW, if you haven't tried the compatibility tests on our Facebook app, you should... they're fun.

Helpful, Funny, Agree is Now Live

We've added helpful, funny, and agree buttons for every review on the site. Each person's profile page is now tabulating votes in each of these categories.

The way it's set up, you can only choose one vote per review - for example, you can't vote a review helpful AND funny.

Please be on the lookout for things that aren't working properly with this new feature.

Search Engine Just Got A Lot Better

We just made a small but important tweak to our search engine.

As you know, the site is partitioned into three primary channels: RIA, Weblists, and Local. Until just a few minutes ago, our general search results were prioritized in that order. So if you did a search for George W. Bush, you would see results from RIA before you saw results from Weblists - we did this because we could vouch for the quality of the listing on RIA, whereas the quality of the listings on Weblists run the gamut from excellent to weak.

The problem with the way things were set up, is that we didn't have control over the weighting involved in driving the results. So the search engine would display ALL results from RIA regarding George W. Bush, even if it was just a casual mention of the word "Bush" in passing in a review, ahead of any listing from Weblists - even ahead of a listing that was specifically about George W. Bush. This was really annoying, and it made it really hard to find, say, where Barry Bonds ranked in the Biggest Jerks in Sports list.

This is no longer the case. We now have control over the weighting for the three partitions for the site. Currently, a search for George W. Bush will still show results from RIA first, but a Weblist listing for George W. Bush will now outrank a passing reference of "Bush" in a review in the RIA channel.

This is a small tweak, but I think you'll find it improves the quality of the search engine dramatically.

I Love Rate-O-Matic

Rate-O-Matic is one of my favorite RIA features to come down the pipe in a long time. I especially like the "speed rate" option for specific lists.

There's a few things I really like about this feature:

- It helps you find stuff that you wouldn't have otherwise rated
- Your rating is not biased by what other people have said
- It's a quick and easy way to blast through a list
- It's a quick and easy way to blast through your own new weblist, to announce its presence to the site

According to our stats package, in just a few short days, the Rate-O-Matic page has become the second most popular page on the site (after Recent Comments).

It seems that I'm not the only person enjoying this feature, and over the next few days you'll see more integration points where you can hook into this service.

Couple of Small Fixes Went Live

We pushed a few very minor fixes live last night:

- The default display in the "Reviews from Trusted Network" display went from two degrees away, to one degree away. In other words, you'll now only see reviews from folks in your immediate trusted network on your profile page.

- We changed the Overall Rating display on each item page from stars to numbers. I was getting tired of accidentally clicking the cumulative rating stars when I was trying to post my rating.

- We fixed it so clicking on the "comments" link associated with any review will automatically scroll you down the page to where the comments begin.

Anonymous Ratings?

Historically on RateItAll, a rating without a review has been as good as an anonymous rating. If I wanted to drop a five star rating on the new Britney Spears anthology, I could do so without fear of reprisal.

This may no longer be the case.

One of the unanticipated features of the new rating widget is the ability to see all of the raters of a given item. Let's take for example, the RateItAll Reviewers list. By building a rating widget for Magellan, you can now see all of the folks who have rated Magellan - whether or not they posted a review. To do this, just play around with the icons at the bottom of the widget.

While this may result in some awkward moments ("I can't believe so and so gave me a one star rating!!"), I do think that more transparency is generally a good thing.

However, now might be a good time to get your house in order in terms of being able to back up your ratings :)

RateItAll Reviewers on RateItAll

Let People Rate Your Blog - From Your Blog

Do you remember all that testing that was going on a while back? Well, what we were testing is this cool new widget that lets you rate stuff on RateItAll without ever going to RateItAll.

We're trying this concept out as a Blog Feedback Widget. So, if you have a blog, and would like to let people rate it right from your Blog, click here.

The widget does all sorts of other cool stuff to - like show thumbnail pics of recent reviewers, and let you scroll through the most recent reviews.

Email Invite Tool

We've just added a very neat tool to all the "Invite a Friend to Rate" pages that lets you add folks in bulk straight from your address book.

This should make it a lot easier to invite friends to rate your stuff, and should eliminate the typo problem when dealing with long email addresses.

Here's a screenshot:

























To try it out, look for the little "Add From My Address Book" icon on any of the invite raters pages.

Take Your RateItAll Reviews With You

Guys, we're VERY close to launching a widget that will let you display your most recent 15 RIA reviews and RIA profile on other sites like your blog or your MySpace page.

Thanks to Ridge, aWiseguy, Kamylienne, GTH, Numbah, Randyman, and HKK for their help in testing this thing (if I forgot somebody, please remind me).

For an example of what it looks like, check out the right sidebar of this blog below the t-shirt display.

There's still a few funky things that I'm trying to solve before I make this available to everybody. Stay tuned... it shouldn't be long now.

Looking for a few good testers

We are perhaps only a few days from launching a very cool new feature. I'm looking for a few brave souls to test this thing out before it goes live.

If you are interested in seeing RIA's latest and greatest, please shoot me a note (or comment to this post). I'll probably only be accepting RIA regulars for this particular release.

How to add a photo to a review

1) Go to www.imageshack.us

2) Upload your photo file and click "Host It" (don't enter in your email, or check any of the other options)

3) Copy the url called "Hotlink for Websits" (it's the third one from the bottom)

4) Paste this url into the body of your review.

This only works for reviews posted from the item page (the one with the formatting tools like bold, italics, etc.). It will not work from the Rate It! pop up window on the list pages.

I think that images can be especially helpful for travel reviews personally, but it will be neat to see how folks choose to use this feature.

Widgets with Images

Here's another neat thing you can do with the new RIA list widgets - you can add a background image. Here's an example:

Check out RateItAll

To do this, just select the middle widget design, and then enter in the url for the image. The best way to generate an image url is to use imageshack.us, upload your image, and choose the "Direct Link to Image" option. It's free and there's no registration required.

RateItAll To Go

Testing a new toy that we hope to roll out soon.