A relative newcomer to the Web2.0 marketplace, Revish.com aims to be a place where “people can share their reading experiences”. Basically, it’s a site where users can post reviews of books they have read and rate them. It also has the usual trappings of a Web2.0 site: tagging, the ability to add contacts and join groups, all glued together by a nice bit of Ajax. Revish is aiming higher than some sites: reviews must be over 250 words long (but shorter than 1000) and there are guidelines for submitting them. Is this Web.20 for grown ups?
It’s early days yet for Revish, so it’s hard to tell how this will go, but so far the reviews I’ve read on the site have been well-thought out and largely well-written. One obvious problem it might encounter is that it takes considerably longer to read a book and write a considered review of it than it does to say, take a photo and upload it. Looking at the number of recent reviews it doesn’t look like they’ll be facing a storage space crisis soon but having said that, reviews are being added at a consistent rate. Having a critical mass of content is obviously vital for a site like this, so let’s hope it keeps going.
Visitors to Revish can browse the latest reviews or search the catalogue, which defaults to Amazon.co.uk, although this can be changed once you’ve registered. They can also search for book reviews. The fun really begins when you’ve registered however. Once you’ve set up your profile, you can create lists of books that you’re reading or plan to read, and rate or review the books you’ve read. You can also add other users as contacts should you feel like it.
The user interface is clean and unfussy with not a rounded corner in site. More exciting for standardistas is that the site is built to XHTML 1.0 strict. The little green tick on my Firefox HTML validator stays proudly displayed on every page from the site. It’s a shame that this should be news, but how many other Web2.0 sites make any decent stab at standards compliance?
Staying with technical build, another notable feature is the site’s use of microformats. I’m still to be convinced of the practical applications of these, but I haven’t really read the books and the blogs so maybe I’ll see the light yet. Having installed Operator, the Firefox microformats plugin I’m invited to find similarly-tagged bookmarks on Del.icio.us and photos on Flickr when opening a review page. Revish also pulls in photos from Flickr that have been tagged with the appropriate machine tags, e.g. book:isbn, book:author and book:title. These features may appear superficially gimmicky, but they do indicate Revish’s intention to play nicely with other web apps; as do the links following each review inviting you to add the page to your app of choice: Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl and the like.
Integration with other applications does appear to be at the heart of Revish. As mentioned, the site’s catalogue is pulled from Amazon, and when you register, you can enter your Flickr Id and pull your icon and details over from Flickr. You can also enter details of your pages on other applications like Last.fm and Del.icio.us. This is a nice touch; and I can only imagine the fun the developers must have had with all the various APIs.
I’d like to see a couple of new features added. I think there’s a real need for some basic content management functionality when writing reviews. At present a review is live as soon as you’ve clicked the save button; the ability to save reviews as drafts and then publish them would be a great help. Otherwise, you’re at the mercy of copying and pasting from other programs — no doubt contributing to the problem of itinerant escaped nbsps turning up in reviews. I’d also like to see a Flickr-style ability to see how many times your review has been read by people other than yourself. At present every time I want to check this, I bump up the viewing statistics by one. Considering how many times I had to edit one of the reviews after it went live, the number of views is probably as much of a work of fiction as the book itself.
Revish’s relatively small size means it has a friendly community feel to it, and the team seem genuinely keen to hear from users. I hope this bodes well for the future of the site, and that the momentum can be sustained.
Tags: web2.0.