Webware

(Credit: Apple)

As an iPhone user, one of the things I've found to be increasingly irksome is the customer review system built into Apple's App Store for the iPhones and iPod Touch.

It's as basic as you get, which follows the design ethos found in the many of Apple's hardware products, such as the no-button Mighty Mouse, disappearing MacBook buttons, and I/O ports on its notebook computers and LCD displays.

While simplicity is one of the qualities that makes Apple's products more approachable for the basic user, it's something that doesn't translate well to a crowd-powered review system.

In its current state, the review system lets you very easily rate a software application from one to five stars, along with the option to write in any thoughts or feelings you have about it. This sounds great, in theory, but a good majority of the reviews found on App Store applications seem to prove otherwise.

More often than not, you'll see one-star reviews in which people are raving about the quality of an application. There are also people who give an application five stars, then go on to spend two paragraphs discussing how often it crashes and larger off-topic issues like international pricing and the handset's lack of a copy-and-paste feature. You also get a lot of comments written in ALL CAPS, with lines of Emoji icons, colored stars, and superfluous exclamation marks.

Some sample reviews taken from Tower Bloxx Deluxe 3D FREE, currently the top free title on the App Store.

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

In every sense, it's like the Wild West: untamed and full of interesting characters.

To Apple's credit, on Friday, the company (as promised) removed reviews from customers who had not purchased the application they were reviewing. This may cut down on spam and ill-conceived or written reviews, but it's not a big step in improving how the review system works.

Problematic by design
The problem stems from the fact that Apple has treated software reviews with the same level of simplicity it's approached movie and music reviews. These two mediums are not interactive, nor do they have hangups like development schedules and performance issues.

While you can rate an album or music track based on your enjoyment of it, it's not speaking to a truth about frame rate jitters, buggy code, or a developer who has not put out a necessary update in six months--all things you may find in iPhone applications and that can be good to know before plunking down money on a purchase.

One reason there's a lack of these types of clarifications in user reviews is that Apple has fragmented its reviews system based on platform. Mobile users don't get the same quality of review browsing as those using iTunes do. For instance, when viewing user reviews in iTunes, you get the option to flag a bad review and say whether it was helpful. You can also sort by best and worst reviews, along with the most helpful and recent.

On the iPhone, users have none of these options. In fact, there's currently only one way to view reviews--in chronological order. For a device that's slowly gaining independence from having to sync up with a computer (as seen in recent improvements to podcast downloading on the device), this is troubling.

A better system
There are a three things Apple could do, explicitly to software application reviews, that would beef up the system and make reviews really matter to the potential customers who read them. All three can be found on Amazon.com, which has done a really fantastic job of creating a single ratings system that works on multiple genres of products:

Tibesti on Wednesday launched the beta of its "social shopping destination," a site filled with consumer product reviews. There are, of course, a lot of consumer reviews sites, and there have been since the Web started. What sets Tibesti apart, slightly, is the way it pays users back for creating reviews.

If you review a product on Tibesti that hasn't been covered before, and someone then buys it by following a link on the site, you get half the commission that Tibisti earns. For this, Tibesti is channeling data from affiliate aggregators Commission Junction and Linkshare. These operations cover retailers like BestBuy and NewEgg, but not, unfortunately, Amazon (Amazon affiliate fees will be pooled and split, somehow, with contributors). Commissions on products range from 1 percent to 15 percent.

The bulk of reviews on the site, CEO Mike Hale told me, will be written by experts in their categories, who are paid by Tibesti. Hale said there are already about 5,000 reviews from about 120 writers.

Say what?

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman / CNET Networks)

A quick overview of the site's contents left me unimpressed. There were errors and serious omissions in the reviews of Nikon lenses, a category I know something about. In a roundup of "Best of the best" laptop bags, the expert included a $400 leather case with no padding. Really? In the kitchen tools category, where I'm less of an expert, the chef knife reviews sounded plausible, but I could only hope that they were more accurate than the lens and luggage reviews.

"We want the credibility of Consumer Reports," Hale told me. Which reviews site doesn't? But you have to earn that by having good reviews.

Buy this and I'll make a few pennies.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman / CNET Networks)

I admit a strong bias here. I believe that specialized and community-focused sites have a better chance of earning the trust of readers. That's why I chose to work at technology reviews publishers, like CNET, for the bulk of my career. A site like CNET.com focuses on technology. It's all we really know. Likewise, if I was looking for a good chew toy for my dog, I would trust the community on Dogster before this new site.

Tibesti is smart to build its business model on affiliate fees instead of advertising. Another shared-profits reviews site, Epinions, initially based its payouts to reviewers on ad revenues. Now would definitely not be the time to try that again. But I'm not sure it's time for a general-purpose reviews site based on transaction commissions, either. It's too broad, and too dependent on consumer spending. And we know which way that is going.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In case you can't read from the screenshot above, Blippr lets users browse and rate commercial products including books, video games, movies, and music. The twist is that these reviews are incredibly short at just 160 characters, or the limit on an SMS message on your mobile phone. Twitter, the popular micropublishing tool pioneered this idea, and the folks at Blippr think it might work on product reviews.

The fact that I need to write more about it is also one of the reasons that Blippr doesn't fit he bill for what it was created for. Sometimes reviews just need to be longer to give a product or service justice.

Coming back to the review system, the written reviews are coupled with a 1-4 rating system that uses emoticons (aww how cute) to establish a metascore for how good an item is. In addition to the rest of the Blippr users scores, you can get see a quick friends score as long as your Blippr friends have rated said item. These scores are shown at the top of each review and help sort through content.

Blippr doubles as a social bookmarking tool, letting you create custom lists and subscribe to the day's hot list of products that are getting buzz. There are no ads on the site, so to supplement an income for the creators, the entire thing runs off affiliate links to various online retailers.

Here's the thing, I like this service at a very visceral level. It rips off a lot of GUI from Flickr, but I'm OK with that because writing 160 word reviews is simple and brings that same publishing happiness that Twitter does. What I don't like is that same limitation ends up amounting to something more like one-line comments on a blog post than something constructive or substantial like you'll find on the native user review systems on popular Web retailers such as Amazon and Netflix. Sometimes the details really do amount to something.

The service is in private beta, although the folks at Blippr were kind enough to offer Webware readers some invites. To get yours, click here. More shots after the jump.

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Recently, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about how Yelp had empowered local restaurant-goers and helped them improve several local eating establishments with their constructive reviews. One thing that caught my eye was the mention of Yelp's sponsorship program, where local businesses can pay for premier placement in Yelp's search results and "sponsor" favorable user reviews so they appear at the top of the list.

The sponsorship program has been around since early 2006, and many businesses have participated in it as a way to enhance their identity on the service. The sponsorship package includes an enhanced profile (slide shows and the aforementioned hand-picked review) and sponsored search results. As a Yelp user, I've seen both elements before and thought nothing of it. That all changed when I read about a disgruntled local business whose owner referred to the sponsorship program as "extortion," since it forces business owners to spend money to change how users experience their listing.

A random example of a restaurant involved in the sponsorship program. The sponsored review appears on top of others.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

That business owner has a point. The profile enhancement element of the sponsorship program undermines the efficacy of Yelp's user-driven system. While businesses can't buy their way out of bad reviews, the fact that they can pay to put their sole five-star rating on top of a sea of bad reviews could be misleading to new users. "We're about promoting good businesses," explains Stephanie Ichinose, Yelp's director of public relations, "Overwhelmingly the majority of reviews you see are positive. People are trying to share...and we've taken this notion of word of mouth and put it in a positive light. What we can do on top of that is take businesses who are interested, and let them enhance it. It's not really any different from the Yellow Pages."

While Yelp's advertising site cautions business owners from reviewing their own establishments, there's nothing to stop a business from creating a dummy account, writing a few reviews, and then sponsoring one of their own--effectively rigging the system. Although doing something like that isn't as easy as it looks, "One of the things that's really hard to do is build a solid reputation with other yelpers," says Ichinose, "[faking] it would be very difficult."

Marketplace services like eBay have had premium paid features for years, but things change when a business reputation is on the line. Yelp's sponsorship program can be used to mask the community's opinion when community opinion is the whole point of Yelp. Though it's important for businesses to be able to respond to criticisms and compliments, the capability to effectively buy sponsorship on favorable content is ethically unsound, as it ends up misleading the Yelp user.

Yelp would not disclose how much its sponsorship packages cost beyond saying they were "affordable" to small businesses.

There's a fine line between advertising and content control. Yelp is treading in a gray area with its sponsorship packages. While paying for advertisements on a search results page is kosher, giving an edge on user reviews pages to businesses willing to pay is not. Yelp is a fantastic service that's steered me clear of some bad places, and it's helped me find new favorites. I don't want to see the site's authority diminished by a program that lets reviewed businesses manipulate their content.

Is this an issue for you? Let us know in the TalkBack.

MojoPages is a new user review site that launched last week. It's similar to Yelp, but MojoPages users can post video clips and pictures to individual reviews about restaurants and local attractions.

In addition to offering a free-form template to create your written masterpiece, MojoPages gives you a form on which you can rate each establishment's value, service, and quality--things often mentioned in a well-written review.

One of the other standouts of MojoPages is the implementation of user photos. Instead of just uploading photos to an establishment's profile page, you can add them to each review. This might come in handy if you find a cockroach in your bowl of soup or want to include a photo of a signature dish you ate. The use of photos lets you narrate your reviews a little better and encourages you to come back and add another review if you try something different. This could be very handy with restaurants and hotels, as the quality can differ among dishes or rooms.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you have a video clip, you can embed it right onto the review page. There's also a built-in recording function to create your own video review using a webcam. Browsing around I found less than a dozen video reviews, but some of the ones on there were interesting. One in particular might have been poorly lit, but it provided some insight into a restaurant's specialties and its chef. The whole experience reminded me a little bit of GeoBeats and TurnHere, but with more indie user-generated content.

Every time you post a review to MojoPages or somebody marks your review as helpful you're given some "Mojo." Mojo points count as prestige or street cred with other users, like what you'd find with Yelp's 'Elite' status. MojoPages also keeps track of Mojo, with leaderboards featuring the daily and the all-time Mojo points leaders.

MojoPages might have borrowed quite a few things from other review sites, but it's made excellent use of photos and videos to help users make reviews a little more dynamic. If you're looking for more comprehensive listings of local spots, competitor Yelp likely has you covered. If you want to make your personal reviews a little richer with media, give MojoPages a try.

This week Yellowpages.com added user reviews to their directory service. Much like Yelp, the new system allows registered users to post one- to five-star reviews of local establishments. I decided to compare experiences using both sites to see how they stack up.

Round 1: User registration and benefits

Registering with Yellowpages grants you a few small perks, such as 100 slots to save your favorite establishments. You also get to save personal addresses and keep track of your last 20 searches. Yelp goes a little bit further with a friends list, a small counter under your name with how many reviews you've written, and a profile page with all your reviews. You can also list your favorites, but Yelp breaks it down into what's in your neighborhood and categories for your favorite places to eat, drink, and shop.

Winner: Yelp

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Round 2: Browsing and writing reviews

Oddly enough clicking on a business listing after a search in Yellowpages pops up in a new window. Clicking the Review button opens up yet another window. If you're keeping track, that's three separate windows you need to manage to get to the review page. From there you can rate it using the star system and add your 2 cents. Searching on Yelp is made easy by letting you search by city or ZIP code. You can also see your recent search locations or add your own location presets, helpful features if you're using the service for work and home.

Searches aside, Yelp provides a much richer writing template, letting you see other users' reviews and adding a spell-check button to (almost) idiot-proof your reviews. When you're done, registered users can tag your review as funny, cool, or useful. The cream of the crop gets featured on Yelp's front page and noted on your profile. Yellowpages has a neat feature to directly respond to a review, essentially making it a forum. Both services have maps, but Yellowpages has a neat bird's-eye view feature that lets you see satellite photos at a slight angle.

Winner: Yelp

In the end, Yelp provides a social network combined with a system that rewards users for sharing their experiences. The reviews on Yellowpages just seem tacked on. You could review 100 places a day on the service and get no real sense that other people appreciate it, whereas with Yelp you have the option to make friends and get a reputation for your work. It goes without saying that Yellowpages can (and likely will) improve their rating community, but if I were to pick from the two right now, Yelp is the clear winner.

PowerReviews collects user opinions from e-tailers.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Found at the Silicon Valley New Tech Meetup last night: PowerReviews, yet another site that collects user reviews (see also ViewScore, Wize, Retrevo, DigitalAdvisor, and TheFind). But in a diabolically clever way: The company's first product, which has been out for a while, is a technology platform that online retailers use to collect user reviews for the items they sell. Businesses using the technology include J&R Electronics, Adorama, Ritz Camera, and Walgreens. PowerReviews provides user reviews technology free to these and other businesses. In return, it gets rights to repurpose the reviews on its own aggregation site.

This setup gives PowerReviews control over two big factors. First, since the company provides the reviews templates to its customers, it can ensure consistency in how products are written up. For example, all PowerReviews-enabled sites ask users to score products on a 1-to5-star scale and enter in pros, cons, and "best uses" for each product. Second, since the reviews are attached to commerce sites, PowerReviews can ensure than only people who actually purchased a particular product can review it.

You can compare brand satisfaction.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

PowerReviews doesn't have to scrounge the Web for user reviews, and it doesn't have to beg users to write reviews for its own site. It just siphons off the data it's collecting on behalf of its customers. And they apparently don't mind, since user reviews are all ultimately connected to the site they came from and can thus generate additional traffic back to the online store.

How is it? The content is quite good, and it's diverse as well. There are plenty of reviews of digital cameras, but you'll also find BBQ grills and bras. There's also a cool feature that lets you compare users' overall satisfaction with a product type across different brands.

My only problem with this service right now (it's in beta) is that the same product, if sold by various retailers, is listed on the site as different products. For example, the Canon SD600 is listed three times, with a different set of reviews for each.

The site should launch in February. If you sign up for the "private beta" now, you should get an access code within a few hours.