Dec 18, 2003 05:24 PM
1267 Views
(Updated Dec 18, 2003 05:24 PM)
General thoughts on mouthshut
We all are aware of the ''pros'' of mouthshut.com, so I won't be repeating that stuff again. We all know that mouthshut.com is an amazing place to be. We enrich our knowledge a great deal. We get unbiased opinions on
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range of products.. from Hotel Taj to detergent powders!!! And, mind you, they aren't just the product specifications which we see in newspaper/ magazine ADs. They are genuine, disinterested ''words of mouth'' and hence are much more reliable and valuable opinions.
However, in my valued opinion, this system has a couple of flaws. Firstly, this
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range isn't wide enough. Often, I feel like writing on some topic, and the topic isn't there!!! This, usually happens when I want to write on a general advice. If it is a product I can always request it using the mouthpad. But there's no such provision for advices.
And, then there's another thing I don't like about mouthshut. By some unwritten rule, the members rate the reviews based on the writing style of the review no matter they agree with the ''contents'' of the review or not. For example, if I write a very flowery review on Ambassador, which we all know, is the worst car in the world, I would still get very useful and my review would even get listed among the first three reviews on Ambassador, and a guest visiting the site would see my flowery review and poor he/she might buy the worst car in the world!!! So, I guess if the members rate the contents, not the language of the review, the top review on MS would truly reflect the popularity of the product and not that of the writer!! Makes sense?
Need to login is another funny feature of MS:
Unless I login I cannot rate, comment reviews. For obvious reasons, MS cannot allow guests to comment the reviews as all netizens aren't benign. But I guess we CAN allow guests to rate reviews. To assure fool proof working, we may give only 1/10th weightage to a guest's rating, that is, a guest will have to rate a review 10 times to have same effect as a member's single rating!!! We may further use cookies or IP address techniques to ensure that same guest doesn't rate the same review repeatedly and ''hacks'' mouthshut. Many a times, people search for information on some product using Google or some other search engine and end up visiting mouthshut. (It least, that's how I happened to visit MS for first time) We might do some justice to such visitors for taking effort to read our reviews.
Also, guests are ''banned'' from reading all reviews on a product. They can read only top three. I believe, this is wrong. After all, such visitors are our potential new members. We shouldn't annoy them by disallowing access to our valuable literatute!! And it doesn't serve the purpose too. A smart guest can always use google and browse our site. Just key in
site:mouthshut.com review on nokia 3610
and you see all the reviews on nokia 3610!!!!
Search a member feature:
The search a member tool is rather ineffective. People often choose random string of characters as their login IDs like- ee00224 !!! (for their own reasons) and there's no way a friend of mine will able to reach me by searching for ''Amey''. I think, we may enhance this tool by providing several fields for searching like name, city, age group of a member. In fact, this is another instance where Google and mouthshut form a powerful pair. You can use Google to check whether your friend is on mouthshut.
site:mouthshut.com Amey Pune male
and you will see my profile page !!!
The bottomline: Mouthshut should consider putting up Google search bar on its site !!!
