The more I think about it, the more amazing it is to me what Kim and I have done _part time_ and with _zero investment_. We’re truly a bootstrap success story. There are others out there for sure, but if you want to support us, we’ll have a badge on our homepage for the next couple days for nominations.

http://www.winelog.net

Thanks.

looks to me like the oldies are the ones we suspected (CellarTracker, Corkd, Winelog) and the others are all pretty much the same. within a matter of weeks in some cases.

i just get a kick out of coments like this one from Chris, when it looks like snooth was actually out first. “I’ve been using http://www.winescorecard.com for a while now and Snooth seem to be copying the same concept. ”

oops – not quite Chris. i swear these TC discussions are always ripe (no pun intended) with bad information!

I prefer two other sites: corkd.com and a rather new one: gurudelvino.com – which has many spanish and south african wines and also very 2.0 stylish.

I incorporated CellarTracker!, LLC in February of 2004 and publicly launched in April, 2004.

Eric LeVine,
Founder, CellarTracker.com

Corkd, Tastevine, Wnelog, and CellarTracker are pretty established. My understanding is that Snooth launched in June ‘07, but I could be mistaken.

cellartracker.com 07-Apr-2003.
corkd.com is 04-Oct-2005.
snooth.com is 22-Oct-2006
tastevine.com is 21-Feb-2006
winelog.net is 09-Dec-2005
winescorecard.com is 15-Dec-06

(Full disclosure: I’m friends with the guys who started Snooth, and I do some consulting work for them from time to time. I’m purposely avoiding any explicit statements about who came first here, just trying to answer a technical question.)

everyone keeps talking about who’s copying who, so i did a little digging. based on archives, it looks like CellarTracker is the oldest, but as far as these new “community” and “recommendation” sites go:

Corkd, Snooth, Tastevine, and Winelog all have their first useful archived pages popping up around mid to late 2006? I can’t find anything for WineScorecard before earlire this year.

Anyone have actual dates for these guys…? It’s hard to say who’s first without hard launch dates.

I’ve been using http://www.winescorecard.com for a while now and Snooth seem to be copying the same concept. I’m sticking with the original for now, until I see a reason to change. I’ve spent a lot of time entering quality data into my profile at WineScoreCard.com

i think you’ve all kinda missed the point. cellartracker is great at what it does: tracking your CELLAR. it’s not a rating system or a good search engine. just a place for people who know they have and want to track it. and winescorecard is not even a search engine at all: it’s just a place to rate wines you’ve already had and they give you recommendations for similar items (albeit good ones).

seems to me snooth is neither of those. its really a place for people to find information about a wine they haven’t had yet. i actually think the issue is their homepage markets them as a recommendation engine when, in fact, the recommendations part of the site is poor at best. but the searching and all the available content and reviews – that’s actually really awesome. sure there are errors here and there, but i’ve been to a ton of wine sites and can’t find any that show as much information about as many wines. i think its great that i can find all this information in one place.

As for Frank claiming that Cellartracker.com and Winescorecard.com have awful interfaces – I would think it would be more important to know how they do at recommending wines than how slick it looks. Personally, I prefer Winescorecard – their matching algorithm seems pretty reliable. Of course, with $1.3 million, maybe Snooth will just buy them and be done with it.

At least you listen to your almost ex-users…

Jo’

Thanks for letting us know. I fixed the wines from Chateau d’Yquem. Good catch!

Mark

I checked myself : http://www.snoo...h/chateau+yquem
There are 4 red yquem wines listed among the first ten results… Come on! there is no such thing as a red Yquem*.

AS FOR THE 1,9M+ reviews : thanks, for several months, logged in or not, when you clicked on their 5-glass-scale they counted it as a rating! I did it at least ten times unintentionaly! My reviews are random but at least they count among the 1,9million don’t they?

So in a nutshell :
Snooth = good idea poorly executed + worthless self produced content + cool CRAWLED content.

I’m tired of greedy people making a living by stealing content produced by others (cellar tracker etc.)

Brian’s comments are especially funny. He clearly is just trying to draw attention to his design firm…LAME!

But Brian, serious… are you high?? The site looks really clean and slick. If anything, the design and usability are the best part. How is it bad design??!

The recent searches link is interesting – I didn’t see that at first. I too was wary of people not knowing what to search for, but after seeing that it appears to me that they get it. It’s a wine site, and the searches are all relevant wine searches. Seems to me that would be the idea… no?

How many years of experience of sucking up do you require?

It’s sooo obvious.

Couldn’t resist, could you?

1 person may say something is fruity, while you may find that wine completely bland and w/o fruit.

You need a way for everyone to try the same few wines, rank them using a simple, well-understood questions “is this wine sweet” “is this wine fruity”, and then match people up who not only like the same wines from this set, but THINK ABOUT THEM THE SAME WAY (ie: both said they give it a 7/10, both said it is 3/10 on sweetness, both said it is 9/10 on fruity, etc.)

Then, you have a trustworthy base to start making recommendations because you know which reviews are valuable to which user.

I believe this is the method that tastevine is using (mentioned in the article)