BuzzShout Blog

Lost Review Users

The past two reviews for LetsPowWow got corrupted, and I couldn't recover who exactly posted those reviews. If you are one the two, please email us at feedback@buzzshout.com to get this fixed.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Server issues

Sorry for the 4 hour downage last night. Our servers were having some issues. The site is a little slow right now, but should be back to normal pretty soon.

Downtime

Sorry for the downtime this morning. There were server issues that needed to be resolved. BuzzShout should be back up now.

Netvibes Glitch?

This has to be a Netvibes glitch right?

Somehow it's hard to believe that 50,000 subscribers came on overnight... or is it?

Update: Turns out that Netvibes might be at fault here.

Spotlighting

Today we rolled out another feature: spotlights. Basically, spotlights take an in-depth look at a new site. It's another great way to keep track of the web 2.0 sphere of websites. Take a look at the first spotlight: Qvey, which democratizes user opinions.

If you're associated with a site, and want your site to be in the spotlight, then simply email us and we'll get the conversation started.

You can also grab the RSS feed for the spotlights to keep abreast of new developments.

Fun with sorting

I fixed a few bugs with relation to sorting.

The first isn't really a bug--sorting by rating now also sorts by the number of reviews a particular company has. I think this makes most sense. If there are more reviewers, there's a higher chance that the company had some people who had said good things about them.

However, this is still not an ideal way to rank companies. A better way would be to do some sort of weighting with the number of reviews and their scores. A standard deviation would also be able to tell whether a particular company has mixed reviews. If anyone has any suggestions on a better rating system, please contact us.

I also fixed a bug with the sorting by ratings while viewing companies that are associated with a particular tag, like photos, for example. After reading some good articles on database denormalization, I think I'm starting to grow as a database designer. In any case, the bug is patched!

More about You

I added a minor update to the user profiles: now you can put more information about yourself like your day job, favorite company, and an about yourself field. So go ahead and fill those out for all to see.

If you have any suggestions for more user fields, contact us!

LogoSurf

I added a quick and fun little feature. You can now click on LogoSurf in the menu to get the listing of all the sites that have logos. I thought it would be fun to surf the sites visually, and to judge the books by their covers. It's kinda like the logo list as seen on flickr, but dynamic. If you don't see your logo on there, that means your company doesn't have a logo uploaded. Contact us with your logo join in on the action.

Mild Stability

Last night I christened ver 1.0 of BuzzShout. We've reached a stable point in the development, and hope to be adding new features soon. The technical problems earlier in the week have been ironed out. There are a few more bugs that I'm currently tracking, but many of them are lower priority at this point.

My goal is to continue growing the list, and, more importantly, the number of reviews. In the meantime, I'll be working on something I call EdgeBuzz. Once it's out, it'll probably be the turning point for this whole site. Stay tuned.

Two Quickies

I added two quickies that were long overdue: the ability to edit your email address, and the ability to remember me (sets a cookie) for your login.

If you currently have a blank email address, it means that you were one of the 30 or so early members of BuzzShout. There was a bug where the email addresses were not being input correctly into the database. I suggest you add update your email address -- this is to ensure that you'll be able to recover passwords and do other adiministrative things in the future. Don't worry, we hate spam as much as you do, and under no circumstances will your email be made public or sold to the highest bidder.

Front Page Redesigned

I went ahead and "deverticalized" the front page. It was just a bit too hard to scroll and read all the information, so I columnized the whole bit.

For the astute ones among us, you've probably noticed that I've added the newest reviews section on the front page as well. Now you can keep up to date with what other members are talking about.

300 and counting...

We're now up to 300 companies and counting. If there's anything I've learned about doing this is that there's more Web 2.0 companies out there than I would have ever conceived, and a good lot of them are outside of the US.

There are companies that have literally launched today that have joined the BuzzShout list.

The server problems should be solved, so if you notice any slowness, give us some feedback about it.

Zap the bug

The users listing page is back up! No more slowness.

Users Page Down

I took down the users listing page temporarily while I debug the problem. We still don't know if it's a server issue, or something more specific to our implementation.

In any case, everything else is working, so have at it with your shouts!

Users Page is sloooowwww

We are trying to resolve issues with the users listing page right now. To us, it's loading slow right now. We'll keep at it to bring it back up to speed.

Also, we added the top companies on the front page, and made a few other small changes.

Stay tuned.