Riffs, a review site for anything, launched quietly last week.
It takes a hybrid wiki/social bookmarking approach. Any user can add a URL to begin a discussion (or just begin a discussion without a URL), and the Riffs community votes on the thing and discusses it in wiki fashion. All pages have RSS and the clean interface has some great Ajax features. Riffs also has tagging, including “common tags”, which I think is interesting.
So why don’t I like it?
It’s centralized content. All of the content resides on Riff’s servers and they require people to go to the site (in one way or another) to add content to the discussion. And in this case it seems absolutely crazy to architect their service this way.
Reviews are everywhere on the web today. And the most exciting place to find reviews in on blogs. Try it – search on “whatever” and “review” and you’ll see thousands upon thousands of high quality reviews on just about anything all over the blogosphere.
Riffs approach is to try to get in the middle and generate a centralized discussion by people who want to talk about a subject. They are staying as open as possible by creating RSS feeds for each page, and my understanding is that they may be creating tools to allow people to push the content they create at Riffs out to their blog, like flickr does.
And it seems to me this is their core mission – to become the flickr of reviews. Not “flickr” in the joking way that everyone says when something is trying to be the cool new web 2.0 application, but literally, the place people put their review content and then pull it out for their blog if they choose to do so.
Fred Wilson writes about the service and addresses points similar to those above that I made on CrunchNotes and Jeff Jarvis made on his blog.
Jeff and my point: Blogs are the place to write content. Microformats and tagging will help people do this. My additional point: And they already are doing it, at massive scale.
Fred’s retort::
But as a content creator living on the edge, I am not sure we are ready for microformats and tags and social interaction to do all the work for us. We’ll get there, I am sure of that, but we need an interim step and that step are services that feel centralized but are really application specific edge feeders. I need a better word for these services, but for now I’ll call them the edge feeders.
I disagree with Fred on this. Flickr is a useful “edge feeder” because it has tools for managing photos that go way beyond what most bloggers have. And more importantly, they host the pictures for you at no cost.
Reviews are different. They are easy to write, easy to publish and cost very little to host. What we need is a service that takes all of this great content out there and pulls it into a centralized place for search and find (and further discussion), but which always points people back to the original post.
Back to Riffs, I really do like the wiki/communit aspect of the service. But they need to find a way to grab their data from the edge first and foremost. If they can do interesting things with it, then they can be successful.
I know why they aren’t doing this. All that open data out there…anyone can take it. If Riffs is successful with my suggested approach, what stops others from doing the same?
My answer? Absolutely nothing. But their current approach doesn’t even put them in the game. I say find a way to aggregate that data and relate it into a discussion somehow, like Memeorandum does on a smaller scale. Then you’ve got a big company.
But you better hurry up. Some guys are already circling the wagons.
Riffs is too much of a hodge-podge for me; I don’t see why I would want politics, humor, arts, technology, travel .. etc all in one place. I prefer review sites with a focus – a’la TechCrunch.
But I think the social voting mechanism is something you may want to consider, if you are deluged by email submissions. Have a complete list somewhere, and those that got the most votes can make it to the reviews.
There are several reasons why a centralized approach can work better. One example is conversation. Let’s say I’m searching for reviews of a new CD. With an edge/aggregator approach, I can see all the different reviews across all blogs and perhaps I’d visit a few of the blogs to check out specifics. But let’s say I want to have a bulletin-board-style conversation with all of the people who have written reviews in their blogs. With a purely edge approach, I have to choose one blog on which to post a comment. Or perhaps I broadcast my comment to all the blogs and check them all the answers continuously. Neither of these solutions will get a core group of people engaged in a single conversation. That’s why bulletin boards are still HUGE and will continue to be huge. Sure they’re centralized, but that’s what makes them truly great. Great discussions arise from a critical mass of passionate people. It is for that reason alone that we won’t witness the death of “destination sites” anytime soon.
That said, Riffs does not do a great job of promoting conversation. I have to expand each review in turn to see if there are any comments, for example. I’m not going to do that for every riff. If they had a simple bulletin board attached to each Riff, I bet they’d get some momentum. But bulletin boards are so Web 1.0
– Scott
Scott, I agree on the “conversation” point and say as much in the post. But right now Riffs is ignoring all this great review content on the blogosphere, and trying to get people to write their initial reviews on Riffs. It won’t work in my opinion. As I say above, if Riffs can grab that initial content from the open web and create discussions around it, they may have a business. Otherwise not.
I really like Riffs’ design and concept. I absolutely love their Nav bar. Besides the “conversation” point made above, centralization provides a built in audience – perhaps the single most important incentive in causing regular people to leave a review.
Where Riffs will struggle is in accumulating content. By virtue of their scope (everything), they will be spread exceedingly thin. To fill out this massive skeleton, they will need more than the savvy blogging community writing a review or two – they will need to appeal to the mainstream.
And my initial take is that the precise reason that this site will appeal to the super savvy (tagging, rss, etc), is also the reason that the more mainstream will be left scratching their heads.
I actually like the interface a lot, and the AJAX is really nice. I agree with the comments about being too broad. If it focussed on specific products/categories and expanded a bit more on the features (with regards to these products) it would probably do better.
I tried it out, but I can’t figure out why I’d want to use Riffs. It doesn’t provide anything particularly useful for review writing; I’d be better off just doing it on my own blog (if I had one).
Perhaps a better approach would be for Riffs’ user pages to function more like review blogs. And then they’d need to offer more specific tools that a reviewer or enthusiast would want. Right now, with their raves and rants and wiki, they’re providing various tools hoping someone will find a use for them, rather than figuring out a good use first and making the best tools for that.
Riff is based on a successful model – Yahoo Message Boards. Yahoo host their content in a centralized fashion and have lively discussion boards on news stories, stocks and other items.
I believe the centralized content/discussion boards make up for the bulk of their traffic and advertising revenue.
The clear advantage of centralized content is the ability to perform data mining to relate stories to users based on traffic patterns (Yahoo does this).
Just like GoogleBase, I Riff is probably one of the better business models out there. Riff can attract the mainstream opinionated people and can grow healthy with their own centralized content.
There is no value in de-centralizing content unless you are a hobbyist developer.
“As I say above, if Riffs can grab that initial content from the open web and create discussions around it”
How would you (or anyone else) suggest this could be done? I think bloggers may get annoyed if content is taken from their blogs and people are making money from it.
Tom,
That may be the billion dollar question.
But don’t forget how search engines make money, and where they get their “content”. I’m not sure there’s much difference.
It sounds like Riffs guys need to talk to Tantek about hReview. It’s a bit scary (for Riffs guys) that a search for “riffs AND hreview” results in 0 matches in the Blogosphere:
http://technora...ffs+AND+hreview
It’s too generic and doesn’t offer value to those outside this Web 2.0 geek scope, but I do think centralizing content (and not in the way hReview is trying to do it) makes a lot of sense.
Tom/Michael;
I’m curious – what if Riffs collected reviews from blogs by offering a trackback url and grabbing the content of the post and starting the discussion like that. Do you think that would be less silo-like? And that way the Riffs guys would only be collecting content that had been offered to them in this fashion.
Realy? That’s 22615 crazy!!
I have just launched a website a couple of days ago called http://www.tagthis.com that gives you suggestions based on what you like and allows you to organize the internet the way you want it to be. It is in early early beta. Also lets bloggers add free tagging functionality to their website.
Thanks