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 We hope these two features will help you to keep your inboxes free of unwanted or outdated messages.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

A Deal A Day

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

One of the things we’ve noticed is that there is a great distance between you, the consumer, and the deals that wine merchants work hard to provide every day. Snooth sits in the middle, giving you a way to find out where the best wines are being sold, and where you can find the best price for those wines. Through the wine search, our wine recommendations, the wine forum, similar wines, the wine page, Snooth provides a great collection of tools to help you find the best deals and drink better wines.

The newest member of Snooth’s family is the Wine of the Day.

The wine of the day highlights a limited time deal from a Snooth winery or retail partner. Get a quick recommendation for a great value wine, order online and save a trip to the store.

Partners, are you interested in sponsoring a wine deal of the day on Snooth? You can do so through the partnership hub.

What Your Friends Are Up To

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

This weeks updates couldn’t come at a better time. With Snooth groups heating up, and curators stepping out of the woodwork to claim pages, it’s great to be able to see what’s happening in your network. With that in mind we’ve updated the Grapevine feed on the Profile page and the Groups pages. They’ve got a new, fresh look and allow you to better see what’s going on. Whether you’re looking to see what the best Rhone Wines are, who’s talking about Pinot Noir, or what people think about Charles Shaw Winery, the new grapevine feeds really speak for themselves, so take a look and let us know what you think.

International Snooth

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

With 60% of Snooth’s traffic in the US, that leaves a lot of people on the site from other parts of the globe. Wine is enjoyed around the world, and we’re very happy to report that Snooth is as well.

For a while we’ve heard from you that seeing prices in your home currency would be a great help. We’re now allowing you to do just that. Now when you visit Snooth, we’ll automatically check where you are and set your home market correctly. You’ll see prices calculated off of your home currency, and the wines sold in other markets won’t effect the price that we show to you. This is a huge step forward for Snooth, and we’re very happy we can help a huge portion of you, the users of Snooth, to find better wines at home where you can buy them, and much more importantly, enjoy them.

I’d also like to make quick mention of the new and improved search results page. It’s fresher, cleaner, and still helps you buy wine online. In the screenshot below I’ve set my country to the UK, and my prices are shown in GBP.

As always we want to hear your thoughts. Give us a shout over in the wine forums!

Import Your Tasting Notes

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

It’s true, Snooth does get better the more wines you have.

There’s a lot of value to the My Wines page (Check out mine here). You can see all of the wines I’ve had and what I had to say about them. Get a recommendation from me by picking a price range, sorting by my ratings and maybe typing a search term into the quick search.

A lot of you could give great recommendations to friends using the My Wines page, and not only that, you can keep track of what you’ve had, and seamlessly make a purchase from 10,000 stores worldwide based on what you’ve liked in the past. But if you have your data elsewhere at the moment, it’s hard to switch.

We’re happy to help with that. Now, you can import your tasting notes, wishlist and cellar and we’ll match them up directly to the wines on Snooth.

Routine Maintenance

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

We’re performing some routine maintenance on one of our servers tonight. Between 11PM and 12AM ET this evening some services on the site will be interrupted. If you notice any issues, they are temporary and no data will be lost. Thank you.