Sorting, Voting, and Sharing

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

This week we have a number of updates focussed on making Snooth more interactive and social. First off is a bit of functionality that users have been asking about for a while. When you’re browsing the prices for a wine, you can now sort the merchants by featured status, name, price and even bottle size. We’re excited to continue helping people find better prices for wine, and this should make it even easier to do just that.

In 2009 Snooth spent a lot of time working with food and wine. In partnership with Epicurious.com and MyRecipes.com we were able to bring you recipe pairings directly on the wine details pages. We’ve heard from many of you that this is very helpful. We did want to gather feedback on individual pairings in the interest of promoting the good matches and tweaking any bad matches out of the system. To that end, we added the ability to vote on specific pairings. We’re looking forward to the added feedback on our electronic sommelier.

Finally, you’ll see more and more links around the site to Twitter and Facebook. We love seeing information from Snooth make it out to other social networks. Adding these links makes it easier than ever to get the word out about the wines, wine articles, and discussions about wine you’re following on Snooth.

Amazon quits the wine industry

posted by philip in Snooth

Today marks a sad day for the wine industry: Amazon Wine, yet to launch, may now never see the light of day. I’m sure many retailers, wholesalers and even some wineries are breathing a collective sigh of relief at this news, for Amazon, with its history of pricing, service and operations, threatened many a wine business.

For you and I, as wine consumers, this is bad news. Its also bad news for Snooth, as a company that is fighting the good fight to help demystify the arcane and convoluted world of wine. While Amazon may have ultimately become a competitor of Snooth, they stood the best chance of any company out there of shining a light in all the dark nooks and crannies of the industry. Hopefully putting an end to shady and illegal practices such as bait and switch, selling a wine that the store doesn’t yet have in inventory, using shipping as a profit center, dual pricing and so many more.

Many of us hoped that Amazon would use its might to force these issues, and others, into the spotlight, forcing new regulation, opening up consumer choice and making the wine industry a better place for all of us. Sadly, these hopes have just been shelved for the next few years.

This story is breaking now, and you’ll be able to keep up with it via Wine Industry Insight and Wine Business amongst others.

Spam and Delete

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

Spam, spam, spam! When we first started building Snooth, there were only a few stalwarts here using the site, adding content and reviews and browsing the forum. (To be completely fair, the forum didn’t even exist back then.) Unfortunately, one of the prices of growing a community these days is fighting the war against spam. A while ago, spammers started to create accounts on the site and would message 10-20 users before abandoning their accounts. You, the users of Snooth, would have no recourse other than to write to us, and we would delete the user, but we always knew we could do better.

The day is finally here. As of today, you can now mark messages as spam to remove them from your inbox. We’ve also added the ability to delete old messages. We hope these two features will help you to keep your inboxes free of unwanted or outdated messages.

It would be even better if the spammers got the hint and didn’t even try to come knocking. I’m not holding my breath for that, but a guy can dream.