With the imense popularity of the thing called Web2.0, the amount of new webprojects is expanding exponentially. And the odd thing is that every one of those projects wants to put the word beta as big and bold as possible alongside their logo on their site.
Not that it bothers me they want us to know their project is still in beta but still i think it’s becoming a little too common. I fear that the word beta is starting to mean something like “hot” or “cool” instead of “buggy” or “not yet ready for frequent usage”.
There are exceptions though. Flickr, gmail and other projects to name a few, run smooth and are used by millions of people every day, but the majority of the new beta webprojects popping up are just hoping for some extra attention if you’re asking me.
Let’s take Wink.com for example. The idea is good, not quite unique but good. Basically it allows us to mark webpages we like with tags and rate them. We can build collections of searchresults about a certain topic and share them with other users (del.icio.us anyone?). This way they are hoping to build up a searchengine-like system of high quality websites and save us the effort of wading through numerous websites with bogus information not related to the thing we are looking for. The only problem I see here is that the biggest webcompany EVER is already doing a great job at that. Google! Del.icio.us is another contender here with good quality links and Technorati offers some great relevant searchresults too. I really don’t think we need another website indexing the web.
Another thing is that personally, i don’t see myself rating the sites i visit through a searchengine. When i’m looking for a site about goldfish for example, and the first result in Wink is the site i’m looking for i don’t see myself going back after my visit and rate the searchresults. I’m too lazy for that first of all and most of the time in too much of a hurry to find what i’m looking for.
Wink has potential but i think it relies too much on users’ contributions. We have Wikipedia where thousands of people contribute each day, but the job those guys pulled off isn’t easiliy matched. We’ll see what the future brings for Wink.
Well thought out. I think your right most people wont give the time of day to rating results after the fact. Then there are people who use wikipedia, and have lots of time on their hands and think that they will be able to change the results. The thing about Wink is their algorithm. I’m not sure how exactly they are placing there results, but the user results are not very acurate yet at all. Try a search for “taxi”. As the founder of Seekum.com this subject interests me. I have noticed that our users have mostly been deranking sites by what we call “deseekuming them” or pressing the minus button to say it’s not relevant.