Product review subsection

May 21, 2005 8:26 AM

As a consumer, I've had a few very good and very bad experiences with service providers, recently. It'd be great if MetaFilter had a subsection to share these experiences to help the community share the joy and avoid the pain. Reviewing products and services where more people will see them is great way to improve services for everyone, and would have the potential for greater effect than discussing these things on our own weblogs. Perhaps this would be another way to harness the community positively in the way Ask MetaFilter has. How about it?
posted by nthdegx to Feature Requests at 8:26 AM (32 comments total)

Books, CDs, movies, concerts, restaurants... Works for me, but I would like to see a bit of infrastructure frontloaded into such an endeavor.
posted by mischief at 8:46 AM on May 21, 2005

I have a system built for amazon stuff, called "MeFi Recommends" that I wrote a couple years ago when the Amazon API was new. Let me see if I can pull up some screenshots of it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:12 AM on May 21, 2005

It would be good but wouldn't it become guerrilla/viral/marketingfilter? How would we stop self-posts or paid posts? Wouldn't people join just to plug something? A restricted way to implement this would work better i think--otherwise it's just asking for this kind of thing to happen.

I don't see how AskMe doesn't already cover most of it, really.
posted by amberglow at 9:12 AM on May 21, 2005

So here's what it does. You write reviews of the stuff you love at amazon, the small bands, movies that didn't do well at the box office but were actually good, and hard to find stuff that works really well in your home.

You review the stuff you love, and it goes into a randomized queue that shows up on comment pages of MeFi. You can comment on products, and when you click on them, you get a page with a large screenshot and the member's full review, the current price pulled from amazon's xml api, and buttons to wishlist or buy it.

I have the interface built for writing reviews (all you do is plop the ASIN number in and it pulls all the relevant data in), but never finished the display end of things.

My thought for going with amazon was that they're pretty universal in what they offer and they have the only standard API for building apps on top of. I saw this as kind of a useful way to find stuff there, so they wouldn't be as obnoxious as ads, and you could always discuss or disagree with reviews you didn't like. I don't know if the associates revenue would add up to anything, but I thought it might be cool if we could try and skew the reviews to lesser known items at amazon (like one of my all time favorite books that no one I've met has ever heard of or read, but should).

Here's the screenshot of what the user might see on the site.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:27 AM on May 21, 2005

I don't see how AskMe doesn't already cover most of it, really.

I don't see how AskMe begins to cover any of it even slightly. Your concerns are quite valid and probably need some thinking about but I do think it'd be a shame to let concerns get in the way. Perhaps a user has to have made X MeFi posts or comments or have been a member for X amount of time to contribute.
posted by nthdegx at 9:27 AM on May 21, 2005

All that is great, Matt.

I have the interface built for writing reviews (all you do is plop the ASIN number in and it pulls all the relevant data in), but never finished the display end of things.

Is there an easy way to use the same interface for services, such as a restaurant (or anything else that wouldn't exist at Amazon), skip the ASIN field but still post the review? Entries without the ASIN would probably need to be exempt from appearing on MeFi comment pages, but it'd be really handy to be able to talk about other things too.
posted by nthdegx at 10:36 AM on May 21, 2005

The beauty of the amazon stuff is that you plop an ASIN into a form, and it can pull a small image for the comment page display, a larger image for the review page, it can pull up amazon's current average customer ratings, it tells my database what kind of item is it (music, dvd, home and garden, so that I can let folks see all music recommendations from a user, etc) as well as current price, availability, etc.

Outside of amazon, there's nothing really like it in terms of powerful, flexible API for data. I know I've seen restaurant reviews on amazon's A9 pages, so perhaps their API will expand to support that.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:02 AM on May 21, 2005

i guess the issue is whether you're willing to forego the images, presentation and database automation for some of the entries. In terms of quality control I guess it might be best to stick to Amazon-listed gear, but it does exclude a lot of things people may want to speak about. For instance, I've recently had a life-saving encounter with some IT people in London who were able to come and salvage data from a borked laptop ridiculously cheaply (considering it was business support). Conversely, I've gone with a new ISP making big promises that, so far, have remarkably failed to materialise. A forum for these sorts of things would be really handy. That said implementing the "MetaFilter recommends" as it stands would be an excellent addition to the site, I think.
posted by nthdegx at 12:28 PM on May 21, 2005

I think this is a great idea, but I also worry about it being a target for spam, viral marketing, whatever. Is there a way to keep this from being turned into an almost useless depository of marketing attacks?
posted by shmegegge at 12:31 PM on May 21, 2005

...I mean there's always the old way of simply writing about it and providing a link. It's just posts like this don't fit the present areas. My view would be that the extra functionality that the Amazon API offers could be used where relevent, but text and links would be perfectly sufficient otherwise.

TellMe? ReviewMe? No wait.... SueMe.
posted by nthdegx at 12:33 PM on May 21, 2005

Rather than having a totally separate MeFi-centered infrastructure for this, I love to see it hook into allconsuming. Is that even possible?
posted by monju_bosatsu at 12:50 PM on May 21, 2005

::::ECHO=shmegegge::::

that means I agree with the shmeggy-one!
posted by taz at 1:03 PM on May 21, 2005

PlugMe? ; >
posted by amberglow at 1:18 PM on May 21, 2005

I like this. Here's one. If you need to make quotes or invoices this free program just shines.
posted by JohnR at 1:22 PM on May 21, 2005

RecomMe(Fi)nd?
posted by birdsquared at 1:29 PM on May 21, 2005

oo. ouch. I think "PlugMe" is really asking for it!
posted by taz at 1:30 PM on May 21, 2005

MetaShillter
posted by dodgygeezer at 1:40 PM on May 21, 2005

and dodgy wins.
posted by amberglow at 1:46 PM on May 21, 2005

ProdMe.
If there was a 4th page with product reviews, you'd prolly need to have some integration with AskMe somehow. And I guess it might take away some of the techy FPP's. Hmm...maybe the blue and green could serve as initial vectors and be fed into another page. With spam concerns things get tricky I guess....jez riffin' away here.
posted by peacay at 1:53 PM on May 21, 2005

Pure consumerist evil, imminent demise of metafilter predicted, etc, etc.

Honestly, though, what the hell? Let's make sure that what we purchase becomes central to every facet of our lives!

Fuck. Do what you want. Just give a reasonably consistent URL so I can filter that shit out along with all the other ads.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:07 PM on May 21, 2005

Sorry. Excessive crankiness, 10 year penalty.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:54 PM on May 21, 2005

Er, yard. That was revealing.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:55 PM on May 21, 2005

SHUT UP WONDERCHICKEN.

/lotsoflove, really
posted by I EAT TAPES at 8:19 PM on May 21, 2005

whoa. has amazon just changed its style? or did following matt's link somehow give me some new style that he'd selected and that i knew nothing about? or am iseeing things?
posted by andrew cooke at 8:37 PM on May 21, 2005

oh. and what the chicken said.

(i just know it's going to be full of reviews of beds, knives and moleskines)
posted by andrew cooke at 8:40 PM on May 21, 2005

::::ECHO= stavrosthewonderchicken::::
posted by dg at 4:46 AM on May 22, 2005

The world is full of much more than what you can buy on Amazon. Limiting a ProdMe type page in this way would frame what this section of the site would become in ways I would find unuseful ["what's the ASIN number for my plumber?"]. Basically, what stav said.
posted by jessamyn at 5:34 AM on May 22, 2005

UseMe seems appropriately ambivalent.
posted by andrew cooke at 6:17 AM on May 22, 2005

Honestly, though, what the hell? Let's make sure that what we purchase becomes central to every facet of our lives!

I don't know -- highlighting poor services which don't keep their promises seems counter-consumerist to me, and if, as I suggested, this was a seperate section of the site, everyone would have the option to ignore it. I don't see any relevance to this hyperbolic reaction.
posted by nthdegx at 6:44 AM on May 22, 2005

well, i guess some of us care about what the site is like - we feel part of a community and how that community develops somehow reflects on us. i don't want to be part of a community that is so centred around consumption. sorry, but that's how i feel, and that "hyperbolic reaction" pretty exactly nails why.

i'd rather matt put effort into a pile of other things (tracking/bookmarking threads for example) rather than helping people buy more stuff. already, the most depressing topics on askme are those where someone asks about a product and everyone who owns it says how good it is. there's not much interesting about a poll of who buys stuff and whether or not one notepad is better than another (and that i can make such observations show that askme already covers most of this functionality).

it's in bad taste, duplicates existing functionality, and there are better things matt could be doing. even if he's just changing diapers.
posted by andrew cooke at 1:45 PM on May 22, 2005

there's not much interesting about a poll of who buys stuff and whether or not one notepad is better than another

Agreed.
posted by languagehat at 3:13 PM on May 22, 2005

Maybe limit it only to products that vibrate?
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 9:20 PM on May 22, 2005