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

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

Revised Logo

posted by Mike in Website Updates, Snooth

If you look carefully you’ll notice that we’ve updated the Snooth logo on the main site (the old logo is still here on the blog for now). While the change is subtle, those with a discerning eye will notice the wine glasses finally look like their contents are sloshing around in a realistic manner. The realism was ensured by hours and hours of rigorous testing at the Snooth Labs and we’ve decided to release some of the test footage to mark this historic occasion. Enjoy, and have a happy new year!

Screwing Things Up

posted by Mike in Website Updates, Snooth

As you probably know by now, Snooth is more than just the world’s most powerful wine database. As a social network, we let our users interact with every single wine on our site - making for an experience that’s exponentially more enriching and beneficial than if we were simply a wine dictionary. But it also makes our jobs exponentially more difficult. From a design and organizational standpoint, we’re constantly faced with the challenge of how to present a bunch of information along with a bunch of ways to interact with that information - all while keeping things uncluttered and intuitive.

Yesterday I’m proud to announce that we’ve implemented a feature that helps address a lot of those concerns. You’ll notice a little green corkscrew icon that we’ve brilliantly named, well, the corkscrew. It represents all the ways you can grab ahold of a wine and interact with it. This includes managing your bookmarks, wishlist and cellar, but it also includes a range of context-sensitive options that will change depending on what page you’re on and what you want to do. What we like about the corkscrew is that it’s a flexible, powerful way to display a host of interactive options to users, all while keeping it neatly organized and one click away. Want to see it in action? Check it out here.

For now, we’ve rolled out the corkscrew only on a wine’s details page, but in the coming weeks look for it to appear almost everywhere you see a wine throughout the site, ultimately making it easier for you to bookmark, organize, and share wines across the Internet. Let us know what you think!

Lights, Camera, Booze

posted by Mike in Website Updates, Snooth

Greetings readers of the Snooth blog! I’m Mike and I’m proud to announce that I’m the newest member of the Snooth team.

My main role as Creative Director, in addition to wearing snazzy hats, bossing people around, and perfecting a subtle yet unplaceable foreign accent, is to help Snooth grow and strengthen its brand. Since the very beginning of Snooth, I’ve been a huge fan of all the amazing features they’ve built, which is why I thought a good first assignment for me would be to create a Snooth video overview.

I figure it’ll serve as a great way to make sure current Snooth users know about all the site’s cool features, as well as entice potential users to join and help grow the Snooth community.

We’re planning on launching the high-resolution video tomorrow but thought we’d treat you to an advance screening. Feel free to offer any thoughts, as well as a suggestion for a wine/popcorn pairing.

Enjoy the show.