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.

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.

Bottle image standards

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth, Partnerships

Snooth is a repository for a lot of information. Since we launched the Snooth Analytics last month I’ve been pleased to see that over 10% of US Wineries have signed up and are using the analytics that we offer. Several times that many wineries (around 30% of US Wineries, plus many non-US wineries) have been adding content to their pages by uploading bottle images, other photos as well as winemakers notes and other content. We’re well on our way to becoming the “go to” resource for anyone looking to learn about a specific wine, anywhere in the world.

All this is free to wineries, and not just that, but we bring the largest audience of any interactive site in the wine industry, and allow the wineries to connect with our users directly. If you work for a winery and you haven’t “claimed” your content on Snooth, its easy, and you can do it here.

The benefits don’t stop there, as Snooth powers many other sites via our series of data feeds and APIs. The point is, if you take the time to add content to Snooth, you can enjoy the benefit of having is syndicated to the tens of partner sites that we power.

One question we get a lot is how should the bottle shots look. At a basic level you want people to be able to recognize the wine from the image, and ideally you want it of sufficiently high resolution to allow users to read the text (some examples to follow):

Now, that’s the basics. For wineries who are paying professional photographers the standards are even higher. Ever since I blogged about the issue of a lack of standardization of images, back in May of this year, we’ve been working with Artisan Media to define what constitutes the perfect bottle shot, and its our hope that when a winery arranges to have their bottles photographed that, in addition to any images they may need for their own materials, they will have a standard shot taken. This “web standard” can then be used for any and all websites, retailers, social networking sites etc.

The perfect bottle shot for the web is a high resolution image taken against a white background. Ideally of the label, but many sites will allow you to upload a label and a bottle image. Having this standard shot taken, and having as many wineries as possible use a similar standard, will allow the wineries much more control over how their assets are portrayed across the web. The specifications are below, and thank you to the team at Artisan for working on this with us:

Final Image Specs:
1 jpg or tiff file at least 11 x 5.4 inches @ 300 dpi, 8 bit color depth (3300 pixels x 1620 pixels @ 72 dpi)
Image should be cropped to make the label as large as possible

Workflow Checklist
1.  Adjust white balance to eliminate color casts
2.  Make sure all letters are visible on the label
3.  Remove any distracting dust, blemishes, or reflections if present
4.  Apply sharpening to image (In Photoshop use Unsharp Mask: Amount 80%, Radius: 1.5, Threshold: 3)
5.  Make sure image is 8-bit color depth
6.  Make sure image is cropped to final specs, keeping the bottle/label as large as possible without cropping into the label

Snooth iPhone site

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

We quietly released the Snooth iPhone site last week, and although we mentioned it on the blog, we’ve been quiet about it while we collected feedback and made a few last tweaks.

We’re excited about this, as mobile apps (there will be others coming) have been one of the most requested feature. Here’s a quick rundown of how you can use the application:

• Location based shopping - this is the killer feature. Type in what you are looking for “spicy shiraz”, “chardonnay under $20 for fish” or whatever and your zip code (US only for now) and we’ll give you wines in-stock and in your neighbourhood. One click to then call the store to hold the item, or to get directions.
• Mobile access to your Snooth Wishlist - when you’re in the store and you know you’re looking for an old favorite, you can call up your wishlist right then and there
• Review and rate the wine while you are out and about. I tried this at dinner on Friday, and have never found it so easy to take notes about the wine I was drinking.

The app is very easy to use and taps into the same huge database that powers Snooth. This means that what you are looking for is probably already on there, and you don’t need to waste time typing it in. Also, anything you do on the iPhone version of Snooth is seamlessly integrated with what you do on the website.

To try this new site out, just use your iphone to access www.snooth.com

We hope you like it, and look forward to hearing how you use it.

Groups : Snooth’s biggest announcement this year

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

We’re all really excited about the significant changes the site has seen over the last 3 weeks. This culminated yesterday with the launch of what we internally called “Snooth Groups”. “Groups” is one of those innocuous internally used words thats fails to do this project justice and its the culmination of several months work.

In a nutshell Groups provides a profile homepage for every winery, store, grape and region in the world (if anythings missing, please let us know and we’ll add it). There are around 50,000 pages in total.

One of the things we’ve prided ourselves on is not launching blank pages and then just sitting back waiting for you, our users, to do the hard work of filling everything in. To help get the ball rolling we’ve partnered with Appellation America and we’ll be displaying their AVA and grape descriptions. We’ve also partnered with Global Wine Stocks (publicly available winery and store data) and Global Wines and Spirits (winery data as supplied by the wineries directly) to help fill out the content. Finally, we’ve been mining the Snooth database of reviews and wines to come up with some brand new ways of looking at this information.

So, what does this all mean? In a nutshell, every winery, region, grape or store now has their own dedicated page on Snooth, where you can check out their basic details (address, maps, images phone number and so on), you can get an at-a-glance graphical overview of the price points a retailer sells at, the grapes a region produces or how the average score for a winery trends over time.

Pictures tell it best, so take a look at the following:

>Each region has a series of charts, this one shows how the average rating for Napa wines has varied over time:

>Another of the region charts is the Varietal Composition - the chart here shows which grapes are grown in California

>In addition to their own custom charts, every store and winery has a section with the basic details: phone, email, website and their ‘about us’ text. This makes it easy to track down and contact any store or winery you are looking for - see the Larkmead example below:

> The group pages are really supposed to be your first port of call to learn about a specific topic, and one of the ways we do that is by pulling in relevant information from across the site. The image below shows the feed for the Robert Mondavi Winery page - here you are able to keep tabs on the most recent reviews of Mondavi wines, talk posts that mention the winery, or the family as well as direct comments, reviews and testimonials that people have left here. The group owner (in this case the winery themselves) can also leave comments, post events and stay in touch with their fans.

> In addition to the images, charts, feeds and so on, grapes have a few additional charts, like this one (shown below) - this is the histogram showing the price distribution of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. The other chart here would show you apie chart of which countries grow Cabernet and how much…

> Once you’ve found some groups you like, you can ‘follow’ the group. This means that your homepage grapevine - the main feed on your logged in homepage - will then keep you updated with the groups activites.

There’s a lot to explore here, so browse around and check out a few of your favorite regions, grapes and wineries - just search for them in the regular search box and you’ll see the links to the group pages.

PS. We’re not done here. When we launch something, its stage 1 on a long road. This is certainly the most massive undertaking we’ve taken since launch, but we’re very excited by the possibilities in front of us. We look forward to hearing your comments and feedback.

Blogger Tool Economics

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

A few of you asked me to explain the economics behind the blogger tools. Specifically how someone can earn money on the bookmarklet when the per-click rate is just a few cents.

The following illustrative scenario highlights how, if a blogger were to make this part of their routine, the aggregate value of all the links in perpetuity would continue to grow and become very significant.

Lets say this sample blog receives 200 readers per day and each embedded link receives clicks according to the following schedule:

• Day 1 (the post is new and people receive it in the RSS feeds): 10 people click a link
• Days 2-7 (people are commenting and linking to the post): 4 people click a link
• Days 8-30 (the article is no longer on the blogs home page): 1 person per day clicks
• Days 31+ (the post is old, but google still deep links to it): 1 click per week

The key here is that even after day 31 the link is still active and brings in a few cents a week, for as long as the blog is active. So even though the first day would only net $0.50, at the end of the first year that link would have bought in $4.10 - and thats per link. Each subsequent year would net $2.60, again, per link.

OK, so $4 isn’t a whole lot, but now lets assume the blogger publishes 2 articles per week. Now you’ve got 100 links, per year, each pulling in $4 in their first year and around half that in subsequent years.

Fast forward 2 years, and if the numbers hold true, you’ve $600-$800 per year. Once we begin to plot that you end up with something like this:

Each link trails off fairly rapidly, but never hits zero. So, like with any long-tail (or power law) distribution, over time these onesies and twosies add up and become very significant. The blue line, which represents total revenue, grows exponentially - and thats how the money is made. Of course, the real amount that you would earn specifically would depend on number of links, traffic and click through rates. The example here is really to illustrate the power of aggregating the long tail.

New Blogger Tools

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

We spend a lot of time here at Snooth HQ thinking about how Snooth can better serve its constituents, and recently we’ve been thinking a lot about bloggers.

With help from our 20 odd blogger beta tester’s (thats “20-odd” bloggers, not 20 “odd bloggers”) we just released the following two affiliate tools which are unique in the industry. Also, particular thanks go to Ryan Opaz for his help in rallying people together to help test the two tools.

Snooth Bookmarklet - The easiest way for a blogger to drop contextual links into their blog, allowing them to monetize content in a more relevant and engaging way than ads - just click on the image below to read more about it.

Installation is literally just a case of dragging a link to your address bar, and then when you need the bookmarklet, just highlight some text, click on the bookmark and it’ll popup with everything you need. From there, you just paste in the link and start earning money.

Snooth Quick Search - A simple implementation of the common side bar search, however with the same search capabilities as Snooths main search engine there’s full support of foreign characters, food pairings, tasting tags and weird queries.

Both these tools are super simple to use, come with tracking code already implemented, and with no monthly traffic minimums and full Paypal integration setup, and payment is a 2 minute job.

Please let us know how you find these and of course, just holler if there’s anything else you need.

Uncommon bottle sizes

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

Wine bottle sizes, like most other things in this frequently quixotic industry, are hard to categorize. Wikipedia shows 26 bottle sizes, but with tetra-packs, wine in a box and other non-standard packaging Snooth has close to 50 sizes in the database. Many of them may have fun names: piccolo, meaning small in Italian, for the 187.5ml tiny airplane sized bottle for example, but they play havoc with the concept of average prices. And this is why I’m writing this.

Before we modify how the average prices for a wine are calculated on the site, I’d like to turn it over to you to hear what would make the most sense to you.

If a wine is only available in Rehoboam and Methuselah (3 and 6 liters respectively) sizes, would you rather we calculated a theoretical average for the 750ml bottle based on standard conversion rates for bottles of that size, or should we just say something like “Price = $2,000, based on 3.0l bottle” and let you figure it out when you clicked through to see the individual bottle prices?

For the casual user the fact that we could calculate a theoretical 750ml price might be useful in quickly comparing different wines, as they’d all be forced to a common scale. However, for the collector, and especially for someone trying to value their cellar, this would prove to be a source of frustration.

Drop me an email and let me know your thoughts, or just leave a comment below. We’ll see whats popular and put that in place.

Calling all bloggers

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

We’re in the process of building a tool to help bloggers monetize their sites. Its still in private beta as we’re working out the bugs and we’re still looking for more people to help us test it.

If you are interested please message me through the site: here.

I’m excited by this, but am trying to keep quiet until its ready for a formal release…