A swift kick…

posted by philip in Snooth

We had our quarterly reviews yesterday and no one was spared from a swift boot to the proverbial behind. Its an important time for us. Everyone has free reign to air any grudges and its cathartic to get this stuff out in the open. Its also very important to me as I’m a master slave driver for continuous improvement. Last year’s effort/achievement of 10 becomes this year’s 6. If it didn’t we’d still be congratulating ourselves that we could sing the abc.

So, we now put everything Snooth has done behind us and rate it a 6. Lets see what we can do in the coming three months:

First off is Talk! Launched last night this is Snooth’s take on a forum. Our old open source forum was integrated and hosted in less than an hour, but as one of our philosophies is “web 1.5: less, but slower” this forum took us a month to build and integrate seamlessly into the site. Its unlike any forum I’ve ever seen so I encourage you to take a look at version 1.0 of our take on the format.

Secondly, search. Our faithful servers are pushing out 1 million searches a month now. We’re going to be doing some fantastic stuff here over the coming weeks. Its all hush hush at the moment, but we’re integrating massive amounts of data and will do some smart filtering to to display more and more relevant results - particularly in terms of showing you relevant merchants who can actually get the product to you.

Thirdly, data. Once our latest algorithm to catch and merge duplicates finishes running we’ll have merged another 142,000 wines. You’ll see the difference then!

There’s some other stuff of course, but this is what I wanted to highlight. We’re closing on our first full year of operations and beginning to find our groove. We’re proud to be a part of this industry and hope you’ll be with us for some time. For us, its Wine Friday and today’s bottle is Cantele Primitivo Salento 2005. Now go check out Talk!

PS. To those that experienced a Snooth without search (server death) the other day, I apologize for what must have seemed a fairly pointless site! We weren’t expecting 19,457 people in such a short time span. However, we were back within the hour and no data was lost.

Community, and the building of it

posted by philip in Snooth

People often forget how young Snooth really is. We only opened our doors to the public with the launch of our site on June 4, 2007. I don’t need to bore anyone by telling you how basic the site was back then; lets just say it was ’spartan’. This email isn’t about the past though, its about the future, where we are headed and how we will get there.

We serve 10,000 people a day and feature hundreds of thousands of wines. However, I still see our site as too 1-dimensional. The average user turns up > searches for a wine > finds it > clicks to buy it now and then leaves our site. They may or may not have an account, rate their wines, manage their cellars and so on. The point is, with 10,000 like minded people flowing through our gates on a daily basis, we can offer more. Our focuses have always been more merchants and more accurate data. To that we now add a third: community.

Over the last few months we revamped the blog and added some very talented guest writers who bring us food and wine pairings, news from Europe, winemakers updates from the fields as well as some very insightful and entertaining discourse. To add to that we’ll be launching a new section of our site, teasingly entitled “talk”.

Snooth Talk will be the launching point for you as a user to begin to connect and interact with the rest of the Snooth community, to share your experiences and give and receive advice. You’ll be able to meet and connect with like minded individuals and the experience is seamlessly integrated into the rest of the Snooth site. The Talk section will also be our springboard into several related community projects.

We’re still in our early days of this at the moment and now is the time for you to speak up and give us your suggestions and wish lists. Tell us what you want and we may go and build it for you - just contact us or leave a comment below. Ultimately this is your site, we may be the trustees, but you, your reviews, and your interactions are what makes Snooth the site that it is.

Out of Beta

posted by philip in Snooth

Mark mentioned this last week in passing, but yes, its official. Snooth is out of beta. We launched our service on June 4th 2007, 8 months ago now. And while we have a long way to go, its nice to see how far we’ve come.

For those brave and resilient enough to have been with us from the beginning you’ll have seen the changes. When we launched we were decidedly beeeeta! So much so that 3 of the 5 main header tabs didn’t function. Day one you had the choice of home or search, soon after that a rudimentary list or your reviews came along (reviews) and it was a few months before friends and recommendations were in place. I think we launched with just 3 merchant partners live as well.

So whats next? Just because the beta moniker, which signals development, is gone, it doesnt mean we’re about to shift down a gear. The big things we have in the pipeline include lots more merchants, lots more data cleanup, more focus on community, making it easier to find and connect with people who share your tastes. Mark talked about the merchant select that we launched last week, we’ll be working on that, making ir more relevant to you, your country, your hometown, personalized…

For us, enduring beta stages signal an excuse. It was right for us while we were still fledgling, but warts and all, we’re ready to move to our next stage. Please continue to send us your feedback, bugs and wishlists and we’ll keep working to make Snooth into the best product it can be.

You’re ruining it

posted by philip in Wine Industry

Yelled at me across a commercial kitchen, Friday night. For a moment I thought I’d mistakenly signed up for a class of abuse from the hot tempered Gordon Ramsey, but alas no, I was attending a ‘romantic’ Couples Cooking class held by the Institute of Culinary Education.

Firstly, I’ll get my rant aside. I was not there to be yelled at, this was a single evening couples cooking class (a ‘romantic’ one no less). You’d think from the screaming and yelling that I had set half the room alight, whereas, my crime was only to have used insufficient flour while rolling some dough. I may be no gourmet, but I can manage a rolling pin, so to my tutor that evening I say ‘FAIL’.

Why is it that ‘professionals’ or ‘experts’ feel the need belittle those with less experience (not talent, please note, but experience). There are times when it may be more forgivable - I used to race yachts offshore, and when its night time and the boat just got knocked flat, no one seemed to mind some ‘heated debate’ in the moment.

I’ve worked in the wine industry for several years now, and still get sommeliers rolling their eyes at what I order sometime. Heaven forbid when I dare to ask them a question. What makes these people different from those masters of their profession who are so affable that I can chat freely away with them, asking questions and learning something new?

Sadly you don’t always get to pick your ‘teachers’, and its clear that knowledge is not correlated with the ability to pass that knowledge on. Worse, even, is the evidence that as a person develops expertise he/she loses the ability to communicate what it is that they have actually learned, and so the best way to learn from them often isn’t to listen to what they say, its actually to copy what they do. Warren Buffet, for example, tells us he wont invest in a stock he comes across on days when his back is acting up. That doesn’t mean you should make investment decisions based on your arthritis. If anything you should just invest in the stocks he does.

So, like I was forced to on Friday night, sometimes it’s best to drown out the drone (I used Gin infused Champagne for that!) and actually concentrate on observing how they act in similar situations. Thats where you’ll learn something.

Superlatives

posted by philip in Snooth

I like milestones, and I set them often. Actually, its not the milestones I like, its the surpassing them. The more you set (as long as they are attainable) the more you get to feel like you achieved.

A fairly obscure one we passed the other day was getting more than 500,000 pages into Google. That gives us the interesting honor of being the ‘most indexed wine site in the world’. Google’s index is a finicky thing, and the results in the primary index change frequently, so I thought I’d grab a piccy before it went away (see evidence below).

In a world where half the time when I google the name of our industry (wine) I get a link to WineHQ, which is a piece of software (open source at least!), and not what any of us would expect, what does that mean to the average person?

As popular as the Wine Unix platform is, there are a lot more people who actually drink the stuff. So, before we claim google’s gone gaga, I’m going out on a limb to postulate that its because us wine drinkers know what we want. In the same way when I get to Zagat.com, I don’t search for “food” but instead type in “late night Italian”, people who google, or snooth, for wines get a lot more specific.

Not everyone is typing in such specific queries as “an earthy red for under $20, from Zachy’s Wine” (although by this time next week, we’ll support exactly such phrases), but in the millions of queries that we’ve had the pleasure in processing for you, its clear that you, the 21st century wine consumer, more and more, knows what you want. And to that, I say, luckily its wine friday, for that deserves a toast!