Perfect Review Sharing

We've spent the last few weeks working very hard on improving the sharing functionality associated with various parts of RateItAll - specifically, Lists, Items, and Reviews.

We've focused our efforts on three ways to share in particular:

- Email
- Facebook
- Twitter

If you look at the top of the right hand column of any List, Item, or Review page, you will now see a "Share This Page" module:

First, let's look at the email sharing option.

Let's say I wanted to share my awesome list of Mexican Beer (which I am very proud of) with my friends via email.

Clicking the envelope icon on my Mexican Beer page pops open the following form:



With this form, I am able to type in email addresses one by one, and include a brief note.

I can also pull in contacts from my address books on services like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail by clicking the "Use Your Address Book Instead" button:


This tool lets you select friends from your address book to receive an email with a link pointing to your list (or item, or review).

Now let's look at Facebook. By now, just about everyone has a Facebook account, and Facebook's newsfeed format is a perfect way to share your lists, reviews, or items with your Facebook friends.

Clicking the Facebook Icon (farthest one on the right), will do one of two things depending on if you are logged into Facebook at that moment:

If you are logged into Facebook, you will see a prompt from Facebook that looks like this:



If you are not logged into Facebook, you will be prompted to login to your Facebook account before seeing the posting prompt above:



When you share a RateItAll story on Facebook, your Facebook profile will look like this:



And when my Facebook friends share RateItAll stories, this is what I see on my Facebook home page:



Now let's talk about Twitter. I know that folks on RIA are a bit skeptical, but this service is taking off like a rocket right now.

Clicking on the light blue "T" icon:

Will automatically open up a new browser window that includes a link to the page (list, item, or review), as well as some text that indicates whether it's a list, item, or review that you are sharing. Here is what it looks like - note that the posting field is pre-populated with the link and text, all you have to do is click "update":



One thing to note - you can share any list, item, or review page to Facebook, Twitter, or Email, whether or not you created the page, and whether or not you are even logged in to RateItAll.

These sharing features are available to everyone, and we hope they will be a great way to get more exposure for your reviews and lists.

Please poke around and let us know what you think.

We just pushed a couple of improvements live

We just made a couple of enhancements to the site:

- We added perfect sharing tools on every List, Item, and Review page. You can now push out any of these pages with one click to Facebook, Twitter, or Email, whether you are logged in or not. This will be a full post shortly.

- The home page river now remembers what view you were on if you click away, so that if you click back, you don't have to reconfigure your view. For example, let's say you are on your home river / feed page, and have used the filters to isolate just comments. If you click away from your home page, and then click "back" on your browser, you will see the same view that you left - just the comments. The only view state we are not remembering yet is the paging - this will be added soon. Sounds minor, but this is a big improvement.

- We have created a short form URL of all of our item and topic pages that can be more easily shared. Here's an example of the long form URL:

http://www.rateitall.com/i-839549-should-never-be-used.aspx

And here's the short one:

http://rateitall.com/i-839549

- We have fixed some annoying formatting issues when publishing reviews to Facebook - things like apostrophes and quotations should work fine now.

Congratulations to our Book Review Contest Winners

There are a couple of folks on the site who have realized that by focusing their efforts on a particular category for a day, they can walk home with some serious loot.

Congratulations to:

1) Irishgit
2) Twansalem
3) CinnLeigh

A close honorable mention goes to edt4.

In this particular contest, it took 42 qualifying book reviews to walk home with a $100 Amazon gift certificate. For some of you folks with 2K, 4K, 10K reviews... it would have been child's play to finish in the money.

Don't get me wrong - We are happy to keep shipping gift certificates and loot to Twansalem and Irishgit - both are very strong writers, and write consistently helpful, amusing, and thoughtful posts. But it surprises me that more of you don't lay off the silly stuff and / or the politics for a day, and put your reviews to work.

Prize delivery will go out today, via email.

Congratulations to those who participated.

Dealing with some performance issues...

.... we're on it. Stay tuned.

Sharing is Beautiful

For the last few days, we've been working very hard on making RIA reviews more share-able. Some of our work is live on the site, and there will be some more tweaks coming.

Here's an interesting look at the 10 most shared reviews on RateItAll over the past 45 days:

Directv
http://www.rateitall.com/r-3849860.aspx

Tribe of Noise
http://www.rateitall.com/r-3901927.aspx

Canaca Web Hosting
http://www.rateitall.com/r-3921430.aspx

Keith Reid
http://www.rateitall.com/r-3925302.aspx

Camel Snus
http://www.rateitall.com/r-3887130.aspx

University of Phoenix
http://www.rateitall.com/r-3884516.aspx

Panasonic Lumix
http://www.rateitall.com/r-4154474.aspx

Jimmy Swaggart
http://www.rateitall.com/r-1343509.aspx

Wal-Mart Super Tech Oil
http://www.rateitall.com/r-2282764.aspx

Quick Update on Sharing Reviews on Facebook

If you see a little FB icon in the header like this:



You are good to go, and can pick and choose reviews to push to Facebook.

If you DON'T see that little "F," you need to click the Facebook Logo in the right sidebar on the home page:


Can people please help us test this feature?

Try logging in with both Facebook and your regular RIA login.

Thanks.

Friday Book Review Contest - IT'S ON

Do you like to read books? Do you read the occasional comic book? Did someone read to you as a small child?

Then you may be well positioned for our Friday Bookworm Smackdown.

You know the drill:

- Any review of a book or author qualifies as long as it's three sentences or more
- Contest runs from Midnight tonight, Thursday, to 11:59PM tomorrow, Friday
- Winners will be determined by number of qualifying reviews within the contest period

send an email to contest@rateitall.com with your RateItAll nickname to participate

Our book section is massively, grotesquely inflated - I bet you will be able to find anything that you might have read.

Prizes:

First: $100 Amazon Gift Certificate
Second: $50 Amazon Gift Certificate
Third: $25 Amazon Gift Certificate


Official contest rules

• Contest starts at 12:00AM PT on Friday, May 15th and runs through 11:59PM PT on Friday, May 15th.
  
• Participants must have valid RateItAll member accounts.
• Contest participants must register for the contest by sending an email to contest@rateitall.com with their valid and active RateItAll nickname in order to be considered for the prizes.
  
• Reviews must be of books or authors to be considered.
  
• Each quality book review will count as one entry in the contest. Reviews must be at least three sentences.
  
• Recycled or reposted reviews will not be considered for the contest, and use of such reviews will be grounds for disqualification.
• Prizes are non-transferrable and are subject to change and availability.
• RateItAll reserves the right to discontinue the contest at any time, for any reason. RateItAll reserves the right to disqualify participants if we determine that contest rules have been broken.
• Questions about the contest? Email contest@rateitall.com
• Winners will be notified on or by Monday, May 18th, 2009.
• All decisions made by contest administrators are final.

Want to rate the local businesses in your neighborhood?

Then shoot me a note. Tell me the town you live in and I will see if we can load up some local biz info for your home town.

We're here to help.

Merge Feature

We now have an administrative merge feature that allows us to merge identical lists together, as well as identical items.

Because as we all know, duplication is such a drag.

If you're aware of any identical weblists, please let us know...

Share your RateItAll reviews with your Facebook friends

For a while now, we've offered the ability for new members of RateItAll to sign up using their Facebook login. This allows these new members to pick and choose reviews that they write to share on Facebook with their Facebook friends.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to offer this functionality to existing RateItAll members, because we didn't have the ability to link an older RIA account with a Facebook account.

This is no longer the case.

We've just introduced the ability for anyone to link their RateItAll account to their Facebook account.

Why would you want to do this? Because it lets you easily share reviews with your Facebook friends, giving your reviews more visibility.

The key aspects of the program are as follows:

- it only takes one click to link your RateItAll and Facebook accounts

- you only share the reviews that you want to - each time you write a review, you are given the option of sharing it with your Facebook friends. If you don't want to, you don't have to - I probably only share about one out of ten reviews that I write.

- once you have linked your Facebook and RateItAll accounts, you will be able to login to RateItAll with one click

To link your RateItAll and Facebook accounts, click the Facebook icon on your home page:


Here's what the Facebook prompt looks like after you write a review:



Here's what a shared review looks like on a Facebook news feed:



I really hope that you will try this feature out. One of the fun things about RateItAll is the "instant feedback" aspect of the site. We write things, and people react to our opinions.

This new Facebook feature increases our collective reach to include our Facebook networks. Folks can even "like" and comment on your reviews right on Facebook.

Let me know if you have questions.

Book Review Contest - Postponed One Week

For the last seven days, our friend and compatriot Automatt has wired himself to an energy drink IV and has been furiously adding books to RIA's database in preparation for the Great Book Review Contest.

He is now adding books, with full descriptions, at the rate of one every seven seconds. He is typing at approximately 4,321,654 words per minute, and hasn't slept since last Thursday.

Astromike, in assessing whether or not he would like to have a beer with Automatt, says it best:

As long as he doesnt bring his lap top to the bar and post list items on RIA all night it could be fun lol. Im sure he's an all right dude. (lol)

Sadly, even at this reckless pace, it looks like we're just not going to be ready for tomorrow.

I've asked Automatt to pick it up all a bit - we should be good to go for next Friday.

In the meantime, for you book readers out there, please start compiling a mental list of books to review. For those who don't read, you still have a week to get started.

More details to follow.

Some Definitions, aka The Most Boring Blog Post Ever

I thought that people might enjoy a peek into the internal RIA HQ nomenclature that we use to describe things on the site.

(editor's note: this is boring)

Here it is:

Definitions:

Reviewer – Registered user

Rating – Value: 1-5

Review – Text associated with a rating

Comment – Response or reply to a review

Item – Something that can be rated (e.g. person, place, thing, Corona, etc.)

Topic – A grouping of items (e.g. Mexican Beer), otherwise known as a list or a weblist

Subject – A collection of topics (e.g. Drinks)

Book Review Contest on Friday

We've done movies.

We've done music.

We've done local businesses.

This Friday will be books... more details to follow.

Speed

The RateItAll dev team has been working very, very hard at making RIA fast.

And I think it's very fast now - as fast as it's been.

I hope you all are seeing the same thing.

You can now see item descriptions on the list pages

A few days ago, inspired by the RIA movie review contest, I wrote a review of the Sandra Bullock coming of age, romantic comedy "28 Days." Among other things I said:

The empty London scenes were the best, and spastic, fluid spewing zombies are certainly more effective than the slow moving sort.

Some have suggested that I may be confusing the Sandra Bullock film with 28 Days Later, about a zombie outbreak in London. This is debatable, and neither here nor there.

What I would like to talk about today is a design tweak we just rolled out that lets you see item descriptions (text, photo, video, etc.) when rating from a list page. This feature might prevent people from getting confused about exactly what item they are rating while on the list page.

Check out this screenshot of my Flight of the Conchords video list.




If I click "Review It!" you will see that the first item on the list snaps down to display the description - in this case, a video.



I think rating from the list pages will be much easier now, especially for items that have images, descriptions, and / or videos.

Music Contest Prizes Just Went Out

Congratulations to OscarGamblesFro, Irishgit, and Frankswildyears - Amazon gift certificate just went out.

Speaking on behalf of the entire RIA community, we expect to see reviews of whatever Amazon product you buy.

A couple of site updates

Two days ago, we rolled in some optimizations to the home page / river that vastly sped the page up for most people.

However, we learned that folks who had subscribed to multiple keywords were seeing some timeouts - this was fixed last night, so now everyone should be seeing a faster home page while logged in. While logged out, we have the home page loading in under 0.2 seconds, which is as fast as its ever been.

Yesterday, we rolled in some optimizations to the list page - these pages should now be loading rocket fast for everyone. Even some of our notorious Crunchbase lists which have 17K items are loading pretty quickly.

Today, we're going to be taking on the item page - once we get done with that, I think we're going to have a pretty fast site.

Finally, we made some small tweaks to the AdSense revenue sharing code yesterday - please let us know if you see improvements in your daily AdSense numbers.

Congratulations to our Music Review Contest Winners

Our top finishers in the music contest were:

1) Oscargamblesfro

2) IrishGit

3) FranksWildYears

Prizes will go out by the end of the week.

Now that Twansalem has a Netflix account, he can't be bothered to participate in our contests.

As has been the case with our previous two reviews contests, I found to the quality of the reviews to be very, very high.

Here is a taste:

Couple of Changes to the List Page

You may have noticed a few changes to the list page.

The two most important are:

1) the introduction of a "confidence score" which is the default view

2) bringing back the number rankings associated with each item (1, 2, 3, etc.)

The Confidence Score reflects how confident we are that the rating is statistically significant. It takes into account a number of different factors like number of ratings, and the distribution of those ratings. The math is actually pretty complex.

For example, check out the beer page. Under the old view, the default view was dominated by a lot of obscure beers with one five star rating apiece.



With our new Confidence Score, you'll see a lot of beers that you've heard of, ordered by how confident we are in the accuracy of the rating:



We are NOT saying the Bud Light is the fifth best beer in the world. We are simply saying that we have a high degree of confidence that Bud Light's rating of 3.05 is accurate.

The practical effect of introducing the Confidence Score is 1) You won't see an item with one 5 star rating outranking an item with 200 ratings and an average score of 4.33; and 2) Our lists will be a bit harder to game

We've also rolled in a few optimization enhancements that seem to be making the site a bit faster.

Music Contest - It's ON

There are some amazing music reviews coming in as we speak, and still plenty of time left to do some damage.

Who's in?

Email: contest@rateitall.com

Music Review Contest Smackdown - Friday, April 17

It's that time of the week again.

We've done local businesses. We've done movies.

And now we're doing music.

The contest will run from 12:00AM PST tonight, to 11:59PM PST tomorrow night.

Here's how to participate:

1) send an email to contest@rateitall.com with your RateItAll nickname
2) start rating Music (musicians and / or albums) tonight at midnight. I recommend our Best Buy channel as it has just about everything.

Winner will be determined by the total number of qualifying reviews in the 24 hour period.

Qualifying Reviews Are:

- at least three sentences long
- of a real band or musician, or a real album

Prizes:

1) $75 Amazon or iTunes gift certificate
2) $25 Amazon or iTunes gift certificate
3) $10 Amazon or iTunes gift certificate

Finishers in the Top Ten will get a RateItAll Demon Star Schwag Package (T-Shirt, stickers, pins).

Official contest rules

• Contest starts at 12:00AM PT on Friday, April 17th and runs through 11:59PM PT on Friday, April 17th.
  
• Participants must have valid RateItAll member accounts.
• Contest participants must register for the contest by sending an email to contest@rateitall.com with their valid and active RateItAll nickname in order to be considered for the prizes.
  
• Reviews must be of albums or musicians to be considered.
  
• Each quality movie review will count as one entry in the contest. Reviews must be at least three sentences.
  
• Recycled or reposted reviews will not be considered for the contest, and use of such reviews will be grounds for disqualification.
• Prizes are non-transferrable and are subject to change and availability.
• RateItAll reserves the right to discontinue the contest at any time, for any reason. RateItAll reserves the right to disqualify participants if we determine that contest rules have been broken.
• Questions about the contest? Email contest@rateitall.com
• Winners will be notified on or by Monday, April 20th, 2009.
• All decisions made by contest administrators are final.

Movie Smackdown Wrap-Up

The KPMG auditors have finally left the Global RIA HQ after a grueling 48 hours of sifting through and analyzing movie reviews for authenticity, quality, and depth.

The results are now in, the volunteers have gone home, the press have moved on to the next big story, and things are returning to a degree of normalcy here.

I am pleased to announce that Twansalem has won his first RIA review contest, authoring over 100 quality movie reviews in just 24 hours. Here's a sample - a review of the the teen remake of Cruel Intentions:



Irishgit staged a late rally but ran out of hours. For a taste of IG's work, check out the following:


For a few hours in the afternoon, a time rich law student named SperryC made a big push as well. If he had been able to keep up this level of production for a few more hours, he may have finished in the money. Here's a taste of his reviews:



We had a lot of fun at RIA HQ watching the movie reviews roll in, and a number of us jotted down movies that we'd like to see (as well as some that sound just awful).

We're going to try and run a Music Review contest on Friday. Hopefully some of you wall flowers will get out there and dance this time.

Thanks to all that participated, and prizes and t-shirts will go out this week.

Movie Smackdown: Unaudited Results

I've done a quick tally and it looks like Twansalem has held off Irishgit for first prize in the movie review contest.

These results are unofficial still - I will try and do a more official pronouncement tomorrow.

Congratulations to all the participants - I thought the quality of the reviews was very high, and it was neat to see movie titles getting unearthed that we hadn't seen in a while.

This was a fun contest, and I think we should do more.

Less than Six Hours Left in the Movie Review Smackdown

There is some serious drama unfolding on RIA in our movie review contest.

Twansalem awoke early and blazed off to a huge lead, perhaps thinking that shock and awe would dissuade other wannabe contestants.

But alas, things would not be so easy.

Twansalem's furious start awoke the sleeping RIA giant, Irishgit who has stormed back with quality review, after quality review. Amazingly, Irishgit briefly took his eye off the ball to participate in a vicious flame war about white poultry meat versus dark. We'll see if this detour costs him.

And just when it looked like a two horse race, a slacking, third year law student, with nothing but time on his hands, has joined the fray.

With under six hours left to play, it looks like three contenders. But if we've learned anything today, things can change in a hurry.

Is there a late burst left from anyone? Will Zuchinibut get serious? Will Numbah put his money where his mouth is? Will Cyclee get off the sidelines? Can Edt4, one of the top movie reviewers on the site, limit himself to three sentences?

In a few short hours we will know the answers to these questions.

50 Minutes Until Game Time

Movie smack down begins in 50 minutes.

Send an email to contest@rateitall.com to participate.

Import Your Netflix Ratings to RateItAll

We now have a feature that lets you import your Netflix ratings and reviews into RateItAll.

Here's how to do it:

1) login

2) go to Home

3) in the right sidebar, click the Netflix logo

Just Because You See a "Buy It!" button.....

.... doesn't mean we're selling it.

We've recently added some helpful "Buy It!" buttons to our list pages. This makes it easy to shop on Amazon for products that have been rated highly on RateItAll. In some cases, this can be very useful.

For example, on this list of children's / fantasy books, the "Buy It!" button makes it easy to get from here:



To here:



In some cases, the "Buy It!" button makes a bit less sense. For example, in our drug awareness section, some people might be mislead by the "Buy It!" buttons next to "Crack Cocaine."



We do not sell things like Crack, Heroin, or Anabolic Steroids. Nor does Amazon, as far as we know. And we have no plans to sell such items in the future.

24-Hour Movie Review Contest Throw Down - FRIDAY

Calling all movie buffs, cinephiles and Netflixters...Get in on our 24-hour cage match movie review contest, with cool prizes to boot!

Write Movie Reviews on RateItAll.com and Win Free Stuff.

How do I get in on the action - it's easy!

• Send an email to contest@rateitall.com with your RateItAll Nickname
  
• Start reviewing movies on RateItAll (any movie title is fine, but it has to be a movie)
  
• Contest runs for 24 hours this Friday, April 10th (12:00AM to 11:59PM)
  

What kind of cool prizes?

• Winners will be determined by the total number of qualifying movie reviews (3 sentences or more)
  
• Grand prize is a six month Netflix subscription! That's over $100 worth of free movie rentals!
• Second prize is a $25 gift certificate from Amazon.
  
• Plus, all 1st through 5th place participants win a stunning, RateItAll happy demon star t-shirt!

You get the idea, now rest up for Friday. Tick tock, tick tock...just 24 hours so don't delay!


Official contest rules

• Contest starts at 12:00AM PT on Friday, April 10th and runs through 11:59PM PT on Friday, April 10th.
  
• Participants must have valid RateItAll member accounts.
• Contest participants must register for the contest by sending an email to contest@rateitall.com with their valid and active RateItAll nickname in order to be considered for the prizes.
  
• Reviews must be of movies to be considered. Members can submit only one review per movie.
  
• Each quality movie review will count as one entry in the contest. Reviews must be at least three sentences.
  
• Recycled or reposted reviews will not be considered for the contest, and use of such reviews will be grounds for disqualification.
• Winners will be determined as follows: (1st) First prize and t-shirt - Six month Netflix subscription will be rewarded to the participant with the most entries during the contest period. (2nd - 5th) Second through Fifth prizes - RateItAll t-shirts will be rewarded to the participants with the 2nd-5th most entries during the contest period.
• Prizes are non-transferrable and are subject to change and availability.
• RateItAll reserves the right to discontinue the contest at any time, for any reason. RateItAll reserves the right to disqualify participants if we determine that contest rules have been broken.
• Questions about the contest? Email contest@rateitall.com
• Winners will be notified on or by Monday, April 13th, 2009.
• All decisions made by contest administrators are final.
  

Claim Your Blog on RateItAll

We've recently introduced "claiming" functionality on RateItAll for blogs, websites, and local businesses. If you have a blog listed on RateItAll in our blog directory (as I know a number of you do), click the green button that says "This is my Business."

All sorts of wonderful things happen when you do this:

- You will have editorial control of the pictures, links, and description associated with your blog listing
- You will be able to grab one of our GORGEOUS "Loved on RateItAll" badges, as seen in the sidebar of this blog, or in the screenshot below
- You will be able, if you want to, to buy additional exposure for your blog, local business, or website

Claiming your blog is free, as are the badges. Let me know if you get stuck.

If you have not yet added your blog to RateItAll, you can do so here.

Sweet, glorious comment editing

It has been *suggested* a number of times that people might appreciate the ability to edit and delete comments that they have posted on a review.

This feature is now live.

Try it out! Say something nasty in a comment, take a deep breath, and then edit or delete it.

Movie Review Cage Match - DELAYED

We have decided to delay our 24 hour, movie review cage match until next week so we can do it right.

Stay tuned for more details.

Quick Hitter Movie Review Contest - a 24 hour cage match

On the heels of our Local Biz review contest in which Irishgit walked away with the big haul, we are going to try a slightly different format.

A 24 hour cage match movie review contest. Winner gets a six month Netflix subscription and a stunning, RateItAll happy demon star t-shirt. 2nd through 5th places will also get t-shirts.

The contest will begin at 12:00AM San Francisco time tomorrow (Thursday), and end at 11:59PM the same day.

My suggestion is this: stop what you're doing right now, and make sure the fridge is stocked with Red Bull or other caffeinated beverages (click through for energy drink reviews).

Then, go to sleep. Tomorrow will be an epic battle of endurance.

More details to follow.

Quizzes

RateItAll Compatibility Quizzes are little ratings games that show how you compare to other folks around the world of RIA.

For example, the beer compatibility quiz asks you to rate a variety of different beers, and then cranks out a compatibility score with others who have taken the quiz.

For example, GenghisTheHun and I are 40% beer compatible, with our biggest difference of opinion being around Corona - I think it's a good hot weather beer, and GTH thinks it's "Miller Lite for the upscale moron."



Recently, I've noticed more people taking the quizzes, which doesn't surprise me as they're pretty fun.

We've just rolled out a small, but important change to the quizzes - the paging is now on the bottom of the page, instead of the top, which makes it far easier to find quizzes you are interested in.

We have well over 100 quizzes - hopefully something for everyone. And now they're much easier to browse.

Is Your Town Represented on RateItAll?

One of my favorite features on RateItAll is the ability to rate any business in the world, whether it's already listed in our database or not.

I've been able to rate businesses from the smallish town where I grew up (Villanova, PA), and I've noticed other reviewers taking advantage of this tool to put their own home towns on the RateItAll map - places like Solon, Iowa and New Westminster, British Columbia.

If you want to make sure RIA has a directory for your home town, this is all you have to do:

1) Rate a business from your town by using this link.

That's it. Once the new business is approved, RateItAll will magically build out a directory for your town, ensuring it is represented in RateItAll-Land.

As the kids say.... represent!

My Compliments to the Reviewer

We've just introduced a new feature - Compliments. This is a replacement for the old Testimonials feature, that allows you to give a public pat on the back to other reviewers. This compliment will show up on their profile page.

All compliments are deletable by the owner of the profile page, and retractable by the poster. As we say here at RateItAll's Global HQ Compound, "What have you done for me lately?"

Here are some screenshots:






So go ahead.... reach out and give your favorite RIA reviewer a compliment today.

Wrapping Up the Local Biz Review Contest

Congratulations to Irishgit for winning both the quantity and quality scores in our recent Local Business Review contest.

He wrote the most qualifying reviews by a long shot, with over 5000 points, and narrowly beat out Twansalem for the single most helpful review. His haul? A Flip Video Camcorder and a $50 gift certificate to the restaurant of his choice.

Newcomer GinaKristie also deserves mention for her reviews of Wichita local businesses, and we had a number of folks win t-shirts.

I was a bit surprised that more folks didn't make a play for the gift certificate - all it took was a single review of a local business to qualify.

But I guess in these booming economic times, a $50 gift certificate is no big deal :)

We will be sending out prizes today or tomorrow, and Irishgit, we'll be waiting for that Flip Camcorder review.

Please be nice to new members

Please be nice to new members.

Please don't jump down the throats of new members.

Please don't scare away new members.

I know that we are the old hats here, and are experts about everything, and really are never wrong about anything. This is, of course, completely true.

But we've all been on sites where the old guard jumps down the throats of newbies, and those sites suck.

Let's not become that site. Everyone was a newbie at one time. Fresh blood is good for the conversation, good for the discourse.

Please don't make us have to legislate this problem away.

Local Biz Contest Update

We are entering the final 34 hours of our local business reviews contest.

As of this moment, it looks like Irishgit is going to be tough to beat for the grand prize. Two contestants with an outside chance of catching him are Twansalem and GinaKristie.

However, everyone is still in the running to win a $50 restaurant gift certificate just by writing a single review.

The local business review with the most helpful points between the launch of the contest and tomorrow at midnight will win its author a $50 gift certificate to the restaurant of their choice.

Why not review your favorite restaurant / bar / coffee shop in the world and see how it goes? You can review any local business in the world by clicking this link.

Also, t-shirts are still in play for anyone reaching 60 points (15 reviews + item submissions).

Scheduled Downtime: Tonight at 9PM PST

We will be in maintenance mode tonight from about 9PM until 10PM as we make some performance tweaks to our database.

Review any business, in any city, in any country

Just a reminder, as part of our current local business reviews contest, you can literally rate any business in the world.

Just use this tool - it will guide you through the process of adding the business to our database. And remember, reviews associated with businesses you add to our database count double - just 15 reviews submitted this way will get you a free t-shirt.

Write Reviews...Win Cool Stuff!

We're running a new contest at RateItAll for all you folks who love to review Local Businesses!

We have some great prizes in store and there are multiple ways to win. The contest starts tonight at 12:01AM Pacific Time and runs for just 1 week, so don't delay! If all goes well, we may run future contests on other topics such as Travel, Books or Events. In the meantime...

3 Ways to Win!

1. Earn the most total Points, win a Flip Video Mino Camcorder!
2. Get the most helpful votes on a single review written for the contest, win a $50 Gift Certificate to your favorite restaurant!
3. Everyone who earns at least 600 points gets a new and exclusive RateItAll Happy Star t-shirt !

How Do I Join in the Fun?

Register for the contest by sending an email to contest@rateitall.com and include your active RateItAll account nickname. The contest starts at 12:01AM on March 10th, and runs through midnight, Tuesday, March 17th. You can join at any time prior to March 17th, but only Local Business reviews written after registration will be considered for the contest. We will send you a registration confirmation email once you have been set up.

How Do I Earn Points?

Points are super easy to earn. You will get 20 points for each new Quality Review of a Local Business (at least 3 sentences explaining your rating). You can earn an extra 20 points if you add a new Local Business in the process of leaving a Quality Review (Add an Item Here).

Any Local Business in Particular?

You can write about any local business in your hometown or a place you've visited. Here are some ideas we came up with to get the creative juices flowing.

Review your favorite:

• coffee shop for people watching
• sports bar to watch the game
• romantic restaurant for a date
• moving company for fragile items
• farmers market for quality produce
• hair salon for curly hair
• bakery for kid's birthday cakes
• auto mechanic for reliable service

So what are you waiting for? Get started now by sending an email to contest@rateitall.com with your RateItAll nickname and earn points towards our awesome prizes.

Good luck and have fun!
The RateItAll Team

Official Contest Rules

• Contest starts at 12:01AM PST on Tuesday, March 10th and runs through 11:59PM PST on Tuesday, March 17th.
• Participants must have valid RateItAll member accounts.
• Contest participants must register for the contest by sending an email to contest@rateitall.com with their valid and active RateItAll nickname. Points can be earned only after registration is complete.
• Points are earned as follows: 20 points for each new Quality Review of a Local Business (at least 3 sentences explaining the rating), and an additional 20 points if the Quality Review is written on a new Local Business submission. Thus, a maximum of 40 points can be earned for any single Quality Review. Recycled or reposted reviews will not be considered for the contest, and use of such reviews will be grounds for disqualification.
• Winners will be determined as follows: (1st) First prize - Flip Video Mino Series Camcorder will be rewarded to the participant with the most total points earned during the contest period. (2nd) Second prize - $50 gift certificate to restaurant of choice will be rewarded to the participant with the most helpful votes on a Quality Review written during the contest period. (3rd) Third prize - an exclusive RateItAll Happy Star t-shirt will be rewarded to all participants who earn at least 600 points during the contest period.
• Prizes are non-transferrable and are subject to change and availability.
• RateItAll reserves the right to discontinue the contest at any time, for any reason. RateItAll reserves the right to disqualify participants if we determine that contest rules have been broken.
• Questions about the contest? Email contest@rateitall.com

More Happy Star

In a somewhat impetuous and extravagant move, we have hired a rather expensive European male model to showcase our new Happy Star t-shirts.

We are going to be running some contests and promotions over the next few weeks in which the infamous happy star t's will play a roll.

Get your free Demon St.... I mean Happy Star Stickers

Our popular little friend, who we've sadly been seeing less of since the site has been optimized, has been immortalized on a sticker.

Whether you refer to him as Happy Star, Demon Star, Carl's Junior, or Devil Star, he makes an attractive addition to any smooth, dry surface.

Here are some shots:



And a more somber, menacing shot:



If you want some free HappyDemonDevil Star stickers, please send a self addressed envelope with a stamp to:

RateItAll Global HQ
Attn: Jose Jimenez
2601 Mission Street, #402
San Francisco, CA 94110

Logging in to RateItAll with Your Facebook Account

A few days ago, we introduced something called Facebook Connect.

Basically, what it does is allow you to login to (or join) RateItAll with your Facebook login information. It also gives you the choice if you want to publish any of your RateItAll reviews on your Facebook page.

I use this feature all the time; because A) it's easier to login with one click than to fill out the fields; and 2) Sometimes I like to share my reviews with my FB friends.

Want to try it out? Try clicking the Facebook logo on the RateItAll login / registration page:



Here's what you will see if you are not logged into Facebook already (if you are, it will just log you into to RIA):



And here's what you see if you write a review while logged into RateItAll via Facebook Connect:



If you choose to publish your review to Facebook, here is what your Facebook profile looks like:



And the link goes right to your review on RateItAll - you don't have to deal with any apps.

The only problem some of you might run into is if you didn't merge your RIA account to Facebook back when we were pushing the Compatibility App. In this case, Facebook Connect might set up a second RateItAll account. If this happens, you can just back out.

More Performance Enhancements

Today we've taken what I consider our biggest performance jump to date. The RIA Dev team moved some code from our web pages into the database, and the site seems to have really responded.

This was a major enhancement that touched a lot of pages. Please let us know if you see anything screwy - but in the meantime, please enjoy a site that is seeming pretty fast.

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.

Couple of Optimizations for Site Speed

We've just pushed a couple of site speed optimizations. Your Home page should load much faster now - my account's home page load time has been cut in half.

We've also made some changes to how we manage images that should help site speed on every page. We are experiencing a temporary issue where our placeholder animal images are showing up on item pages for folks who have real profile images - this should be fixed shortly.

Finally, item pages should load a bit faster now as well.

Pushing some performance improvements

We are pushing a few bug fixes and performance optimizations - we should be back up shortly.

Heads Up: Helpful Vote Adjustments

There are about 73,000 "orphaned" helpful votes in our system (out of a total of over 2M). These are either votes from reviewers who are no longer with us, or votes on reviews of items that are no longer with us.

We are deleting these votes as they are causing us some synchronization issues.

There will be some impact in the Hall of Fame rankings, but it should be fairly evenly distributed.

Major Performance Enhancements

We've rolled in a few significant performance enhancements that should make the site noticeably faster.

While every page should be affected, the page that you should the most impact is the list page. I think we have these loading pretty quickly now.

One of the enhancements that I like the most is the inline rating on the list pages. You now don't have to wait for the review field to slide open - it just snaps down. No more happy star here.

We're going to continue to work on speeding the site up over the next few days, and then hopefully move on to some other things.

This Week's Priority: Site Speed

I hope that you'll agree that V3 has been getting tighter and tighter (and hopefully, better and better) over the last few weeks. Thanks again for all the feedback- it's very helpful for us in terms of prioritizing fixes.

This week we will be focusing on optimizations to increase the speed of the site. I'm hopeful that we will see some big performance increases by week end.

New Item Bug Fixed

I think we have solved the problem that was:

- preventing people from suggesting new items
- preventing people from approving new item suggestions
- preventing people from adding new items to their lists
- preventing people from using the global "write a review" link at the top

Please let me know if anyone is still seeing error messages.

Subtle Change in How We Handle Ratings

If you're paying extra close attention, you'll note that you'll no longer see the happy star loading icon after you click on a star to select your rating.

The star just populates now with no waiting.

This has to do with a subtle change we made to how we process ratings.

This should dramatically speed up the inline list rating, as well as quiz taking.

In other news, we are still dealing with some performance issues and general bugginess with adding new items to the site, whether it be via lists, the "write a review" feature, or approving items to your own list. I hope to have an update by the end of the day on this.

Update

We are repairing some indexes in our database in an attempt to resolve the performance issues that have been plaguing the site for the last 48 hours or so.

As of now, no ETA on when we'll be back up, but it shouldn't be too much longer.

Working Through Some Performance Issues

Stay tuned.

Improvements to Item and Topic Pages

We are quietly plugging away on implementing some of the things we had on V2 that didn't make it into the V3 launch.

We've tightened up the list pages, including adding back the precise numerical rating for each item on the list:



We've added "Next List, Next Item" links at the bottom of every list and item, which makes it easier to browse horizontally through the site:






We've added a neat "Also Listed In" feature to the sidebar on every item page that pulls up other places in the site where the same item appears. Here's an example for "Madonna":



Stay tuned for more tweaks and improvements - little by little we are getting there.

Problem with Our Database

We are experiencing a hardware issue with our database. We are in the process of switching over to our backup db now - please stay tuned.

Your Posts now Showing in Your Feed

By popular demand, we now include your site activity in the "My Feed" view. This should prevent folks from having to toggle back and forth to different views to see their own stuff.

And as one reviewer put it, it's much easier to see how your reviews are doing in terms of votes with this format.

Cocktail Party

RateItAll is hosting a cocktail party tonight in San Francisco to celebrate the launch of V3. Anyone who is local is more than welcome to join - ping me for the details.

How New Items Are Approved on RateItAll

We handle new item suggestions in V3 a little bit differently than we did previously.

In V3, any new item suggestion - whether you add it to somebody's list, to a RateItAll list, or using our new "rate anything" feature - the new item is immediately created. You can rate the item, you can share the url of the item with your friends, and you will immediately see the new item / review show up in your "my feed" view. No approval required for this part.

However, there still is an approval process - either by the list owner, or by RateItAll admins. An approved item will show up in search, on the list, and in the My Feed and Everyone's Feed views. As with the previous site, if the list owner does not respond to a new item suggestion within a few days, we will step in and approve the item.

Rate Any Business in the Whole Wide World

Here's another feature that's kind of neat with V3, that we didn't have with V2.

In V2, we had a RateItAll Local section that was limited to about seventy big cities in the US. If you didn't live in one of those big cities, you were out of luck in terms of rating local establishments in your home town.

In V3, we turn things upside down. Instead of folks having to wait for RateItAll to add a city to its directory to rate a local business, we add the the city to our directory WHEN you add and rate the local business.

What this means is that any RateItAll member can add and rate any local business in the world. We have just about every country covered, and we can now build out a local directory on the fly for any city, town, or village, in any country.

Try it out HERE.

Today's Updates

We rolled in a bunch of fixes / updates today:

- The editing profile / account bug is fixed.  You should now have no problem embedding videos and things

- We expanded the length of the feed.  We doubled the number of stories in the default feeds from 10 to 20, and each time you click more, you get another block of 20.  This should reduce the clicking required to see content.

- We enabled video and safe html embeds like YouTube videos into reviews and item descriptions.  We're still working providing editing buttons for things like bold, link, and italics for your reviews.

- We fixed a number of one off bugs

- We tightened up quiz results, stripping out results from folks who have only rated a couple of things within a test.  We also changed the definition of a "match" for the purposes of calculating a compatibility score.  Before today, a 4 was considered a match with a 3, 4, or 5.  We've now put in exact matching for the compatibility calculation.  Because of this, you will no longer see pages of 100% matches, but the results will be more meaningful.

I think those are the big things.

If you bear with us, you'll notice a gradual tightening of the site as we listen to your feedback and squash known bugs.

Thanks for your patience!

Today's Lesson: Configuring Your Feed / Home Page

Hi all, there's a lot of new functionality on the site, and I want to start giving some pointers as to how stuff works.

Today I'd like to cover the Home Page / News Feed view for logged in members.





There are three tabs and two buttons on this page.

The tabs are: Me, My Feed, and Everyone.

The "Me" tab displays your most recent activity on the site.

The "My Feed" is your custom, personalized view of recent activity on the site - more on this to follow. At its simplest level, this view is a combination of the activity of the people that you are following, and the topics that you are interested in.

The "Everyone" feed is the full firehose of ALL recent site activity. You can think of this view like the old Recent Reviews page, but supplemented with other activity like new lists, new items, quizzes taken, and even ratings posted.

So how do you control these feeds?

There are two ways (and these are the two buttons).

The downward arrow is a Temporary Filter on whatever view you are looking at. It's an easy way to isolate certain story types - just lists, just ratings, just reviews, just quizzes, etc. When you click away from the home page, your Temporary Filter settings will be forgotten, and your view will go back to your Permanent Settings.




So how do you control your permanent settings?

It's the Gear Icon. This is where the magic happens, and where you can personalize your permanent feed views to your tastes.



Let's walk through the Gear Icon settings one by one.

Keyword

The first tab on your settings is a Keyword Tool, that lets you subscribe to keywords that you're interested in. For example, if I type in "Mexico," "San Francisco," and "NBA," the site will do its best to include every review from RateItAll related to those keywords in your "My Feed" view.

Using the keyword tool, you can also indicate stuff that you DON'T want to see in your "My Feed" view. For example, if you were sick of reviews about Dingos, you could add the word "Dingo" to your block list, and the site will do its best to filter out reviews related to dingos from your "My Feed" view.




Community

The second tab in your settings is the "Community" tab. On this tab you can specify whose activity shows up in your "My Feed" view. Do you want to see only activity from your friends (people you follow)? Or do you want to push it out a few degrees to show activity from friends of friends, or even, friends of friends of friends. The "friends of friends of friends" setting will give you the broadest view of site activity.

We've also built in a helpful, albeit devious tool for filtering out reviews from particular reviewers here, even if they are your "friends" on the site. For example, if I got sick and tired of activity from "Lawrence," I could add filter out their activity. This feature is perfect for when you feel the pressure to follow someone, but don't actually like reading their stuff.

Like the Keywords tab, the Community tab only affects your "My Feed" view.




Saved Topics

The third tab in your Gear Icon settings is the "Saved Topics" tab. As you browse the site, you may have noticed "Fave" buttons on various pages - items, lists, categories, etc. Clicking Fave on any content page of the side will subscribe you to all the activity from that page.

For example, one of my favorite lists on the site is Mexican Beer. Clicking the "fave icon" on this page will subscribe me to new reviews posted to this list. It's a great way to track the reviews coming in to lists that you made, or to track reviews of a specific item like your blog, or yourself! (if you are on the reviewers list)

Like the Keywords and Community tabs, the Saved Topics tab only affects your "My Feed" view.




Story Types

The final tab is the "Story Types" tab. This is the setting that determines what types of things are included in your Feed views. Do you want to see only reviews like the old recent comments page? You can make that happen. Do you want to see Reviews, Comments, Quizzes, but not Ratings without reviews? Likewise, this is easy to do.

Unlike the other tabs, this setting affects all three tabs (me, my feed, everyone) on your home page.

This is a permanent setting, and the system will remember your choices as long as you are logged in, and until you decide to change them again.





I hope this helps. There are powerful tools in here, and I believe that folks now have the tools to create exactly the experience that they want on RIA.

Thanks for all of the feedback - it's been very helpful, and we're acting on a number of the suggestions already - please keep it coming (feedback@rateitall.com).

Meet The RateItAll Team!

Here is live footage from RateItAll's Global HQ Compound on launch day. Some of what you see may shock you, some may excite you, and some will most certainly confuse you. Enjoy.

V3

As most of you already know, V3 is live. We "soft launched" quietly yesterday with the goal of doing some bug fixing before our public launch today.

We will be doing a number of posts in the coming days about some cool, expert only type features that are on the new site. We'll also be doing our best to explain how basic things work with V3, as well as working hard to eliminate any outstanding bugs - thanks to all who have sent feedback to us (feedback@rateitall.com) regarding bugs, missing features, and the like.

Here are my three favorite new features on the new site:

1) The news feed. The code name for this feature internally was "the river," and I think that's pretty descriptive. This is the home page for logged in folks. You can poke your head into this page and watch all the activity from your friends flow on by. In one sense, the Recent Reviews page on the old site has become the primary metaphor for V3. We have category level rivers for things like Sports, and Subject level rivers for things like Baseball. For the advanced users, you can customize your news feed settings by clicking on the Gear icon on your home page. You can follow keywords for things you're interested in (e.g. beer, art, music, movies, etc.), and you can set your network settings to include friends, friends of friends, or even friends of friends of friends. You can even do things like hide all activity from "My Feed" of particular users (ever have somebody that you need to be their "friend," but don't actually like reading their reviews?) And finally, you can hide keywords like "politics" or "religion" if the droning starts to get your down. I find this feature extremely powerful. I see it as the power to build the exact RateItAll experience that you want.

2) Compatibility Quizzes. These are a fun, quick way to rate a bunch of things and compare yourself to others around RIA. We have hundreds of these quizzes, across many different categories. We will be working on tightening up the quiz results display (so we don't show folks who have only rated one item within a quiz), as well as making the results more precise. We will also be adding paging to the bottom of the quiz pages, and adding in quiz specific search to help with the discovery of new quizzes. This is a fun feature that's only going to get better.

3) "Write a Review" Feature. The internal code name for this feature is "global add." It literally lets you write a review of anything. There's a wizard that walks you through the process of adding new items to the site, and we try to always provide a catch-all topic for your item if you can't find the exact right place to put it. For me, this changes site experience dramatically. I can now rate any damn thing that I please, whether or not a list exists for it. A dish at a restaurant. A taqueria in Mexico City. My friend's blog. You can add anything and everything, and the item will immediately be available for rating and sharing (though it will need to be approved to show up in site search and the list). Try this feature out if you haven't already - it's powerful.

(Forgive me a quick sentimental moment, but I'm really proud of the RateItAll team. These guys really went all out on this - for the last few weeks, the office was full seven days a week, and often until midnight. We're all a bit exhausted (my wife said to me this morning, but feeling pretty good about where things are at.)

That's all for now. As I said, there will be lots more to follow on how this thing works.

Bugs?

It's bug fixing day. If you see any bugs, please send them to feedback@rateitall.com - this blasts out to the whole team.

Data Migration has Begun

Guys, we've begun our data migration in preparation for v3 launch on Tuesday. As of now, we have no eta on when we will be back up.

The next step is to put v3 up behind a password so we can do some final testing before going live with the new site. I may call some of you in to help us test, with live data.

Downtime and Launch Schedule

Guys, we will be taking the site down on Sunday evening in final preparation for Tuesday's launch of V3. There's a lot of data that needs to be migrated and a lot of testing still to be done.

I will share more info when I have it.

New Blog Design

Our little RateItAll Blog with its 850 posts has gotten a makeover, courtesy of our user experience expert, Lena.

It's been pointed out to me a few times recently that this blog looked more like a Lawrence personal blog, than a RateItAll blog.

I can't argue with that.

Hopefully we will be able to mix in a few posts from folks other then me going forward.