Comments on: Crowdstorm comes back, but can it cut it?

By: Fabio

Fabio — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 16:31:50 +0000

First thing first, I like the new Crowdstorm a lot more than the previous version.
Talking about Google is a bit out of theme here… even if they’d like to hear people saying “crowdstorm it” I don’t see a Google-issue. People will always use search engines, but they will also use other services for certain things. Buying a new camera (or just having a look at what people say about a certain camera) is an example. Ok, if you’re a camera addicted you’ll have your favourite review site or whatever, but if Crowdstorm will be able to aggregate great content, mash it up with UGC, grow a community of passionate people and serve a nice UI… well, I see a bright future for these guys.

By: David Basnet

David Basnet — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:01:19 +0000

Anyone can aggregate - will users see past this to join in and make it work?

By: Philip Wilkinson

Philip Wilkinson — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:44:57 +0000

Some fair points there Mike but bear in mind that a lot of our content will be coming from aggregating expert reviews from a lot of our partners, who we’ve signed up recently. Cnet, gamespot, IGN, trustedreviews, whatdigitalcamera etc… This makes it pretty valuable to have these in one place and to let users rate the reviews and sources.

The next stage of Crowdstorm over the upcoming few months is to really deploy and expand on our distribution platform strategy. You will be able to share and export the content chunks. You will be able to submit content from anywhere on the web and you will be able to export the data where you want. Right now we’re building the IE / firefox plugins, the widgets, the social network integration apps, the add to “x”, and the “rate my review on Crowdstorm” style functions. Expand the tentacles! - official project title:-)

Greg - on your point regarding “vulnerable to fraud” - it’s why we make sure everyone has a profile for the trust and knowledge ranking to kick in. Over time, the more trusted someone becomes by everyone else - the more effect their votes have and vice versa.

So - crowdstorm.co.uk is the first deployment phase of the whole project - now the rest of it will start to be hooked in. Consider Crowdstorm a “hub” for review content…

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:24:13 +0000

Crowdstorm looks interesting, but product review directories are so common these days that I think they’ll have a tough job convincing potential users that they’re different.

It worries me that these kind of sites are so vulnerable to ‘fraud’ - what’s to stop manufacturers ‘dissing’ their rivals’ products and ‘bigging up’ their own?

By: Jack

Jack — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:23:10 +0000

I don’t think there’s enough of an advantage in using a site like this compared to just googling a product name and mentally filtering the responses. You certainly have more chances of getting some results with google…