The web is teeming with user reviews on everything from movies to VC firms. But with so many detailed opinion pieces available, getting to the bottom line can be difficult.
Today sees the launch of PhrazIt, a site looking to cut through the noise by offering users a tag cloud related to various topics on the web. Rather than employing a traditional star or numeric system to rate a topic, PhrazIt uses brief words or phrases no more than 30 characters long.
Once a user has chosen a topic on the site, they’re presented with around 25 tags that have been entered by other visitors. You can either add your own description, or you can click on one of the existing tags (the most popular tags will grow in size, allowing users to summarize a topic quickly).
One of the biggest drawbacks to PhrazIt is that all tags in the cloud are pulled from submissions from the site itself. Instead of searching through popular review sites like Amazon or Rotten Tomatoes, PhrazIt relies on user-submitted data. This works well enough for popular topics (like Batman, seen below), but it makes searches for less common topics a waste of time.
PhrazIt is the first company to launch from the DreamIt Ventures early stage startup incubator, which is similar to Y Combinator. The incubator is currently working with its first “class” of eleven startups, and will have its first exhibition day in early September.
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Yet another gadget-y service, pretty to the eye (maybe) but I don’t think consumers will be attracted to use it: when looking for reviews, I want to read other people’s full experiences, details, and be able to read between the lines and judge for myself if the product is a fit for me or not.
In today’s fast pace society, who has tme to read full experiences? Most sights have tons of blogs that take forever to scan. If this were for a large purchase, maybe, but otherwise I love the idea of quick reviews. Gives me what I want in a glance
Apologies for typos and spelling!
TLDR!
how come jason isn’t able to review phrazeit in 30 words then?
I agree with you. If I’m actually looking for valuable input that will help me I don’t think 30 words quite cuts it. I’d rather take a little more time reading in order to get as much information as I can. It’s an interesting concept though for those who don’t want to spend a long time reading.
http://www.KillerStartups.com
dreamit….explains everything. quick more artilcles to bury this one.
Hmm… it seems to work in English only. So if they want to go in another country, they would start with zero again…
I like the idea of a short review database, but there are many things that can not be reviewed with 30 characters
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Speaking of which, WP Review Site, a commercial plugin for WordPress, just came out last week. It makes it easy to build customer-powered review sites with WordPress, adding configurable star ratings to posts, pages and comments… essentially lets you collect Amazon-style reviews-plus-ratings on whatever the post/page was about, and display the average ratings and such.
5 minute abs
Oh ok, it’s click to vote. I thought it was just a link to the movie when I clicked on “the best movie of all time”… Then I saw the dark knight thought people would review that but that was the tag.. I didn’t read it properly but the least they should do is make sure the tags look differently from other links, not just in size.
Either way it’s a stupid idea that can be easily replicated.
Okay, here’s an idea for a Web 2.0 site Twitter luvrs will be amazed by:
http://www.I.it
It’s a autobiography site where you can post up to 1-character.
Jason Calacanis has already got $20 million in VC funding for it.
What’s the point? Its just extreme tag-the-net. It doesn’t tell me anything and its just dumbing us even more.
AWESOME tool. Makes it so easy to see and understand how people feel!
All I can say is WOW! I was wondering whether to see The Dark Night and the following reviews were particularly useful:
“coca cola”
“cuil”
“haven’t seen it”
“Gay”
“katie holmes has nice boobs”
“mobile report”
“morgan stanley”
“sex and the city”
This is honestly the lease useful website I have seen in a long time. This is a BUSINESS? with FUNDING? SERIOUSLY?
This sort of thing is nothing new - I’ve been running TheTenWordReview.com for a couple of years now, and The Four Word Film Review has been around for a while too.
phrazit is not keeping it simple. the domain name alone puts this company to pasture. dreamit means you can dream all you want. I give, im headed to valleywag. it can be very difficult for us trolls to find a good bite to eat. were starving.
predictions? (linkback) PhrazIt - 30 character reviews of everything [VOTE] - http://www.thriveorfail.com/3d5e4
Why are you plugging such an awful site?
THRIVE!?! Seriously?
People who don’t understand what makes a good domain name should be banned from registering ANYTHING.
plugging phrazit is 10x worse
Two thumbs down!
another twitter clone
how is this differ from the other clones in review niche blippr
these niche service have no way to generate more revenue then a few pack of beers
Oddly enough, the engineers were paid in beer.
I think it’s very interesting idea, and in response to the complaints regarding the 30-character limit, I think the kind of knowledge bank composed of of brief opinion “keywords” is a different kind of resource. It cannot be compared with existing opinion presentation techniques. Sites like Phrazit are a symptom of the need for immediate and concise feedback and would prove invaluable to corporates and marketing bigwigs. GOOD STUFF!
It reminds me of the entry for Earth in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“Mostly Harmless”
I think it’s a good idea to see what terms seem most common from those that have reviewed the product. But I agree with many others on this thread that a) it will only work for popular products and b) you will need access to the details behind the tag cloud should you wish to investigate further.
Retrevo.com offers a slightly different approach to getting users a quick assessment of the user reviewers collective opinion. We synthesize all the reviews from amazon, cnet, etc. and then evaluate the overall sentiment - positive, neutral or negative - and then give users quick links to read summaries from each site and then if they choose, click to the source site and read the full review.
-Robb
this is such a ripoff of http://www.thebeststuffintheworld.com
Nice idea. Their success/failure will depend on the implementation and the marketing budget though as the idea is not enough by itself.
I would say that they should also let people leave longer reviews with the longer reviews being shown when clicking on one of the tags (only the reviews by the people who added that tag).
The site has immediate value to small business. The ability to create a feedback machine and then post it on my site is valuable to that business and their customers AND at the same time builds the Phrazit database as it grows. Web 2.0..right?…using passive data to make it better for the rest. I’m a fan.
I find the website a bit too plain, when you go vote something its just a simple tag cloud..
for reviews ratings and opinions about anything.. check out http://www.PlanetRate.com its a cool review/rating system with in depth categories and properties for each category..