New websites comes along all the time. My friends call out “hey, I’ve got free invites for the newest hottest site, who wants?” and I’m always jumping on to see what it is. Most of them I can’t remember a day after I signed up. But the most recent one I’m playing with has gotten my attention. It’s called blippr and the tagline is “Radically Short Ratings and Reviews.” The idea is that people rate books, movies, music and video games with “blips” - 160 character or less mini-reviews.
Ever since I first started browsing the internet I’ve been enthralled by ratings websites. I remember the first recommendation website I found, way back in college. You could rate movies and it would suggest other movies you might like! I spent hours rating things on it, just stars, but I loved it. I think I’ve since gone though and rated hundreds of items on dozens of websites. I mostly use Amazon at this point and have given up on the rest. But this one seemed fun so I’m giving it a try.
There isn’t really enough data yet to give you recommendations yet, so I’ve just been having fun rating things. You rate on a 4 point scale - don’t like, whatever, like it, love it. The final score for the item is some sort of average of everyone’s ratings, but it’s fun to read what people have to say. The recommendations come in by the fact that it’s also a social network site. You can follow people you tend to agree with. You can also agree or disagree with any single blip. This information is compiled to give you recommendations.
I’m finding a lot of joy out of crafting the perfect 160 character blip. How can I say what I want in a concise and interesting way? Sometimes I get to the limit and go back deleting and rewording to get my point across. It’s fun!
It’s still in beta so you’ll need an invite, of course. Email me if you want one, I still have a few. Things I’d like to see - maybe some sort of authority rating based on how many people have agreed with you or disagreed. I’d also hope that the different types of media have separate recommendation scales. I find that while I may agree with people in regards to movies and books, my music taste is vastly different. I really doubt they’ll be able to recommend a music album for me based on what movies I like.
Overall, it’s fun. I find myself popping over there and reviewing at least one or two items a day. We’ll see how long they keep me interested!
One Response to “Blipping away”
Hi Tara! I’m the tech guy over at blippr. I’m really glad you’re liking what we have so far, and hope that as the site grows it’ll continue to scratch that itch. We do indeed do different recommendation scales for each type of media. Our general philosophy is that if you trust a friend’s movie opinions, you might be more interested in seeing what kind of music they like (even if you disagree with their taste) than someone else’s. However, if you consistently disagree on movie taste, blippr will definitely pick up on that and make recommendations accordingly.
We’re hard at work analyzing the data we’ve collected so far, and are constantly working on finding ways to express relationships and the trust that they convey in a more useful manner. We’re pretty convinced that the general idea is rock solid, and we’re going to keep tweaking the specifics until we get it right.
In the meantime, thanks for the feedback, and glad you enjoy blippr!