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.

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 We hope these two features will help you to keep your inboxes free of unwanted or outdated messages.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.

What to Expect

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

This week we’ve got a few exciting updates on the site. The first, and highest in profile, is a new section on our wine profile pages. As I continue to grow with my knowledge of wine, I find it’s very helpful to talk to someone who is further along in their journey. It is helpful to localize what I’m experiencing to hear someone else describe what they’ve grown to know.

On many of our wine profiles, you’ll now see a section that does just that. It tells you what to expect when you’re tasting the wine. I’m excited to use this to get a hint about what I might find in a new grape or new region’s wines.

Here’s an example of this section on a Napa Cabernet Sauvignon, certainly one of the distinctive and iconic wines of the world.

We’ve also made it possible for users to upload more than a single photo for any wine profile. If you’ve got a bottle shot of your own, you can now add that to the wine. This can be very helpful, especially when the current photo is blurry, or if you have a version of the bottle with a label from another country. The same wine can have different labels in different markets, so one image may not be enough information.

Related Content

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

There are a few great reasons why the collection of websites that we have come to rely on is called the World Wide Web. One of them is how much it does resemble a web. The places and destinations on that web are interconnected. On a spider’s web, any one strand would blow away in the breeze, but the connections between them make the whole structure strong.

Websites linking to each other makes a powerful network. Just as powerful are the links within a site, directing related pages around and allowing for a seamless browsing experience. With the release of our article pages, we found a great opportunity to go back and strengthen the Snooth web. When you’re reading an article or a post in Snooth Talk, it is very convenient to be able to learn more about the wineries, wine regions, or wine grape varieties mentioned in the text. Now you can do that using our handy links. If you’re looking at the details for a Chardonnay, and you’re curious to read what articles have been written about Chardonnay, now you can do that too.

We hope this class of helpful links will allow the site to flow more, and help you to become lost in the pursuit of more wine knowledge, as we continue to bring more of it into one place.

Making Articles More Social

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

It’s no secret that we’re excited about the articles section. As the newest pages to launch on Snooth, they represent our continued commitment to bring information about the greatest wine regions, wine varieties, wines and wine producers directly to you. Through our emails and now the article pages supporting the emails, we’re ready to start sharing.

What’s sharing without friends to share with? Snooth is a social site, and an article without a place to talk about it is like a tree falling in the forest. If we don’t invite conversation from you, we aren’t doing the right thing. So this week, we’ve got a few exciting additions to the article pages. First off, you can leave comments right on the articles. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure your voice is heard.

To make sure that voice continues to be heard, everyone should be able to find articles from the past and the comments that have been made on them. As of today, you’ll notice a convenient search box to the right of the articles so you can find commentary about whatever you’d like to learn about.

If you’re keen to browse, we’ve also added a related articles section. If you love an article, and you’d like to learn more about related topics there’s a simple way to do that. All of these (and a few other goodies) we’re happy to present to you today.

Check these new features out on Greg’s articles about California Sauvignon Blanc or California Syrah.

I’m looking forward to future changes. Have you told me what you’d like to see yet?

Welcome Home!

posted by Mike in Website Updates, Snooth, Wine Industry

This week we’re proud to unveil two new and exciting additions to Snooth that we think you’ll find extremely useful. The first is our new editorial homepage, and the second is the launch of our much-anticipated articles section. Together, these enhancements kick it up a notch and help make Snooth an even richer online resource for wine.

The new homepage puts the best of Snooth front and center. With a site as large as Snooth it’s helpful to have a starting point that ties it all together. With popular wines, forum topics, news items, food pairings, and easy access to your account, the new homepage is a great place to come whether you’re looking for something specific, or just looking for inspiration.

But the centerpiece of the new homepage is our new articles section. For roughly the past year, Snooth users have been receiving helpful Snooth emails chock full of wine reviews, winery and winemaker spotlights, region profiles, wine deals, and much more. And this week we’re proud to announce it all has a permanent home on Snooth. Starting today, every Snooth email you receive will also be published on the site - meaning you’ll never have to dig through your email to remember the name of that winery, or that intriguing varietal with the funny name… Now it’s all on Snooth and always just a few clicks away.

While we’re thrilled to launch these new features, we’re just as exited to make them even better. We hope to hear your feedback on what’s new, and what else you’d like to see in the future. We also wanted to thank our users who took last month’s user survey. Your feedback was instrumental in creating these features that aim to make Snooth - and wine in general - more enjoyable for everyone.

Cheers!
Mike

When good things break

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

Over the last few days there have been several articles over how the technology blog, Mashable, has taken the number 1 spot from Techcrunch. Both sites now have approximately 2 million monthly readers, plus many more follow their news via email, twitter and other networks.

We’ve experienced first hand close to 10 times what an article from either of these giants can do to our daily traffic patterns. And, over the last few years we’ve added monitoring, cronitoring, redundancy, failover and other safety systems designed to handle these bursts. But last night, we screwed up.

Mashable wrote about our iPhone app, which, because it was brand new, and hosted on a different set of servers, did not have all the fail safes in place. As a result the index server that powers the search results for the iPhone crashed. We noticed the error at 6.50am Eastern time this morning, woke everyone up, and by 7.20am the server, and the service was back up. This affected the API server and the iPhone search results only.

We’re busy today adding the redundancy and failover solutions to the API and iPhone servers that keep the main Snooth.com site working smoothly. Apologies to anyone who was affected by the iPhone outage.

So far the feedback to the iPhone app has been great, one twitterer claiming that it made “an iPhone worth having”.

Here’s a sample of other chatter about the app:

UPDATE: The Mashable story is being highly Digg’d on Digg.com (a news site with 30M users per month). You can see the article and vote for it here. Please support Snooth and help us get to the home page.

Snooth iPhone app

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

We just released the FREE Snooth iPhone App on Friday and already have over 1,000 downloads. Here’s an example of using the app to find a mid-priced bottle of Pinot Noir near your location.

You can download the FREE Snooth iPhone app here.

Snooth’s iPhone Application

posted by Mike in Website Updates, Snooth

Just a few months after launching our iPhone-optimized website, we’re proud to announce the completion of our first native iPhone application. Here’s an example of using the app to find a mid-priced bottle of Pinot Noir near your location.

Like the iPhone website, the application is powered completely by the robust and growing Snooth API - which essentially gives developers unfettered access to the world’s largest repository of wine data. When combined with other powerful APIs (such as Twitter and Facebook) this is an opportune moment for developers to create a wildly popular (and potentially profitable) wine application.

The iPhone application is pending approval from Apple, but stay tuned for updates. Developers can follow Snooth Dev on Twitter.

Cheers!
Mike

Voices of Snooth Update

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

We’re pleased to say that the reception to our “Voices of Snooth” initiative has been phenomenal.

As you’ll recall, we recently released group pages for every region, winery, store, attribute and grape in our database. Because the volume of activity on these pages continues to grow, we now need a human touch to help guide and facilitate each page.

Over 60 people have spoken up so far, and we’re delighted to have noted bloggers Catavino, Spittoon, BudBreak, Lenndevours and Kyle Phillips, among others.

At present, we are letting users pick what they want to administer, as we believe these communities are self-policing.  If the moderator does a strong job, the page will become interesting, more people will join, and a community will grow. If they don’t, then the page will remain stagnant, and we would then have to look at giving a new applicant a fair shot.

Also, it is important to note that is not limited to professionals and that enthusiasts have a fair chance. The goal here is to foster a discussion, and a curator can do a great job no matter their level of expertise. To that end, it’s been really nice to see many of Snooth’s power users (Oceank8, HondaJohn, RBoulanger, ChipDWood, Eric Guido etc.) claim groups they are interested in. Plus, you get links to your own personal blog or project, and the nice distinction of anchoring a community.

If you’ve been waiting to get involved, now is the time to step up and claim your page. We’d love to have your help in facilitating vibrant discussions and growing Snooth to its full potential.

To get started, just navigate to the page you want to be the voice of, check to see if it’s unclaimed, and then use the link in the pop-up window to directly apply.