Viewscore aggregates gadget reviews

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1. Amiz
   

   August 30th, 2006 at 11:28 am

   BTW, the story on digg:

   http://digg.com/tech_news/View.....et_reviews

2. kaiju
   

   August 30th, 2006 at 12:06 pm

   Worthless site, most reviews on sites are just copies from other sites with a different score added to it.

3. Startups.in/India
   

   August 30th, 2006 at 12:14 pm

   On a first look, their interface (see the two sample URLs pointed below) seemed strikingly similar to some other site I’ve come across earlier..though I can’t remember it at the moment.

   http://viewscore.com/vsCP/3
   http://viewscore.com/vsPP/3/1851

4. Andrew
   

   August 30th, 2006 at 12:20 pm

   Sigh. These guys stole a lot of things verbatim from our previous startup, and admitted to as much on our blog.

5. Amiz
   

   August 30th, 2006 at 12:22 pm

   Kailju

   if you are claiming that all review content is duplicated on regular basis in the review sphere how come the scoring\parsing system ViewScore is using is giving diffrent scores to diffrent reviews for the same product ?

   if you are right then the algorithm will give the same score to all the duplicated reviews….

   please go to- http://www.viewscore.com/textscore.php
   to get more information.

6. Scraper
   

   August 30th, 2006 at 12:40 pm

   REALITY CHECK:

   This is NOT a business - this is a scraper.

   (just like thousands of others on the web)

7. Marshall Kirkpatrick
   

   August 30th, 2006 at 12:49 pm

   If it were a scraper it would display the reviews on site - it links out to the full reviews on the pages the data is aggregated from.

8. TechcrunchReader
   

   August 30th, 2006 at 12:51 pm

   Posts like these decrease Techcrunch quality and lower my faith in web 2.0. Please, post about something original. I haven’t seen a startup with a truly original idea profiled on Techcrunch in a long time (and if there were any recently, there certainly aren’t many). There must be MANY more web 2.0 sites out there that you can post about rather than solely Google or unoriginal sites like these. I personally don’t care if the site’s ugly, not usable, has bugs, etc.: just something original!

9. Aviva
   

   August 30th, 2006 at 1:08 pm

   Seems like a good tool that can help someone decide which digital camera or other personal tech product to buy. I’d rather get an average product review rating from a source like this, and then decide which reviews, then read 57 reviews about 7 different products, and forget what the first one said after reading number…

10. TechWarrior
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 1:24 pm

    Sounds cool, but we’re forgetting one little, insignificant detail, where’s the business model? and please don’t tell me its ads

11. Skip Trace
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 1:25 pm

    Yet another gadget review site. Et tu, Brute? Et tu? =)

12. Amiz
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 1:51 pm

    From ViewScore:
    The business model is revenue sharing agreements (PPC) with shopping comparison sites.(this has no influance on the product rankings and provided by third party)

    example:
    http://www.viewscore.com/produ.....l_offers=1

    We have also XML API for product review feeds that we offer in private label syndication.

    as you can see on this israeli price comparison engine web site:

    http://www.pricer.co.il/public.....iewId=1852

    Cheers,

    Amiz

13. Vaibhav Domkundwar - iNods.com
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 1:53 pm

    Marshall:

    Thanks for the iNods 1.0 launch today (http://www.inods.com)

    We are covering a broader spectrum (products, places, and more) and really surfacing valuable review content, which an increasing number of users are relying on everyday before making buying decisions. With the community of iNods members saving useful review sources, the best review content is made more easily available and users benefit from each other.

    I think, once a review aggregation service is able to build trust with the end users that it allows them to find the best advice quickly, then the upsell and advertising/affiliate business model can be very strong.

14. Branden
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 1:53 pm

    Yeh sure, the idea isn’t new, but I see some real value in these types of review aggregation services. I’ve found metacritic (the movie review aggregator) handy on a number of ocassion. Having all the “professional reviews” for a product handed to me in one location is handy. It saves me from conducting multiple searches and weeding through a lot of crap. Even Google thinks this: http://tinyurl.com/r6vcv.

    Disclaimer: I work for a company that’s already aggregating user reviews and is working on professional reviews. Yes, my opinion is biased.

15. Taz
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 2:27 pm

    hey TechWarrior .. why do you care if the business mode is ads? if that’s what they want to do then leave them to it. what you seem to be missing is that even if the intial model is ads they are collecting data and data always has value if used in the correct way.

    hey marshall .. is the reason you write stories that appear on crunchgear to increare the technorati score of crunchgear. because if you have more blogs linking to you then you rate higher. i guess it would be a good strategy to get google rank them higher as well. it just seems like a waste to have crunchgear if you are going to re-write the stories on techcrunch. just have the one site.

16. Marshall Kirkpatrick
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 2:29 pm

    A relatively small percentage of stories are cross posted between this and the other blogs, and this was a story John Biggs and I both worked on.

17. Nick Pang
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 3:41 pm

    i like trustedreviews more than a normalized aggregated rating. why make it harder to decide on a gadget by giving too much data? “don’t make me think” - quoting krug.

18. TechWarrior
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 7:02 pm

    You’re absolutely right about data collection Taz. But will their ad revenue be sufficient enough for them to be around long enough to collect that data?

19. Amiz - ViewScore.com
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 11:34 pm

    From ViewScore:
    The business model is revenue sharing agreements (PPC) with shopping comparison sites.(this has no influance on the product rankings and provided by third party)

    example:

    http://tinyurl.com/ep4ez
    Cheers,

    Amiz

20. DigDude
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 11:35 pm

    To be honest, I don’t really care about their business model, this site saved me a lot of time when i went to buy my new PDA and that’s enough for me.

    All and all - quite usefull tool for online shopping, i would recommend it to my friends.

21. Amiz - ViewScore.com
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 11:37 pm

    We have also XML\API for product reviews feed that we offer in private label syndication.

    as you can see on this israeli price comparsion engine link:

    http://tinyurl.com/kc7nd

22. yaron
    

    August 30th, 2006 at 11:37 pm

    If you are interested on reading another review on the product, but in Hebrew you are most welcome to read it here: http://www.thecoils.com/2006/08/03/viewscore/

23. jcar
    

    August 31st, 2006 at 12:36 am

    Does anyone know the legal ramifications of aggregating data from other sites in this fashion? This company is making money from content that other sites had to earn by attracting users and getting the users to write reviews. Now viewscore can send out a crawler, take the review and post it on their site. Suddenly other people’s content is being used by viewscore without permission and viewscore is profiting from the users that click on the shopping.com provided links to buy the product. Personally I like the idea of aggregation because it makes it easy for the user, but is it legal?

24. Amiz - ViewScore.com
    

    August 31st, 2006 at 1:09 am

    Jcar,

    You have raised excellent question.

    Let me start with a small question – isn’t that exactly what Google is doing in their organic search results?

    And to be more ViewScore.com specific – Our TextScore technology is generating a reflecting score for each review,And that new score is our intellectual property; you can think of this as abstract of the review that we generated. http://www.viewscore.com/textscore.php

25. Moshe Katzmann
    

    August 31st, 2006 at 1:32 am

    I like this site, normalisation is a good idea.

26. Ohad
    

    August 31st, 2006 at 2:02 am

    Jcar, I might have misunderstood your comment, and Amiz got it right, but as far as I see it, the question you ask is not relevant.

    ViewScore system doesn’t copy the content of the review, it just process it. In order to read the review the visitor is pointed to the real site, thus rewarding more traffic to the original reviewer.

    On a side note - I know we’re all techies here and we all look for new technologies above all. But for the common user the technology is secondary to the content he gets. If viewscore, or any other site, would have a lousy backend but a good service that saves time and effort - that’s more then enough.

    The thing is that once a couple of sites provide a similar - yet decent - service, the one that will become the popular is the one with the better marketing. Like it is for any product, real or online.

27. jcar
    

    September 1st, 2006 at 12:38 am

    Botom line, have you had any sites threaten you with legal action? If so what happened? Have you gotten any advice from an attorney? It’s definately a grey area.

28. Sten Pittet
    

    September 1st, 2006 at 4:10 am

    In my opinion I think that this website got it right.

    First, the benefits go to the user. For a person who is not really used to hi-tech choosing a laptop can be quite difficult. A lot of buyers on the net may ask themselves “Is this what I need ?” “Is this a good product” and the problem on the net is that you can’t ask an adviser to help you in your choicie. Few comparators have trustfull and interesting comments on products so if one of them is aggregating all the reviews to tell the visitors wich products are considered as the best ones than that’s a pretty good service and a lot of people would see the benefits.

    Secondly when you click on a review you are redirected on it (although you have a top bar with viewscore options). That means that Viewscore generates trafic for them (at least one page view). And most of the site editing content on the net expect a lot of these page views because their business is based on selling ads. The more page views they have the more ads they can sell. So I guess that sort of a way they get some benefits from it.

    Finally if you’re against the use of content coming from over website then what about Netvibes ? WebWag ? My Yahoo ? MSN Live ? Those sites are making money by providing contents coming from other websites….

    Excuse me for all the mistakes I must have made. I’m french and still working on my english. I really think they have something here and I’d like to know more about the stats…. I doubt that the other companies will look at it saying “Oh just another web 2.0 site…”

29. Amiz - ViewScore.com
    

    September 1st, 2006 at 4:43 am

    from ViewScore:
    just quoting a message we got yesterday from one of the sources:

    “I just got an email about your new site. My name is XYZ , I”m the publisher of XYZ.com and I noticed you guys are linking to our camcorder reviews - thank you! I would also like to suggest one of our other sites, XYZ2.com, which uses the same high quality standards for reviewing digital cameras as we use for reviewing camcorders. Good luck”

    Jcar - i think it will answer your question and suggest that it is symbiotic relationship.

    -Amiz

30. manu
    

    September 18th, 2006 at 6:12 am

    this site sucks!!!!!!!!!!who the **** made this site i wanna kick your ***

31. PixelFactor
    

    September 25th, 2006 at 2:47 am

    I dont understand what all the fuss is…..some people like it, some dont, but i see no problem with doing a little free advertising for a company, especially if you find the topic / information interesting and worth sharing.

    For more updates check:

    http://www.pixelfactor.org

32. Anonymous
    

    September 28th, 2006 at 7:31 pm

    It would be nice if this company took a moment or two to create their OWN “ABOUT US” section. It is a verbatim rip off of the Become.com site. Even to the extent of copying the Arbitration rules.

    I am sure you will hear from the lawyers soon enough. If you have the ethics to do that, I really wonder what other IP or proprietary information you have stolen for your use.

33. Raj
    

    February 3rd, 2007 at 3:34 am

    Nothing new. A lot of sites have this. http://www.phonescoop.com and http://www.explore-mobiles.com also have something similar.