My impressions of @gdgt
In summer 2008 a friend and I launched a social shopping web app. We ended shutting it end of last year. The reason gdgt.com is really interesting to me is because it has lot of stuff that we did and were trying to do. Having spent a lot of time designing and building a social shopping app, I have to post a review of gdgt.com!
From what I read in the tech blogs is that this is a solution resulting from Peter’s idea of building a place where gadget lovers can share what they have, want etc and Ryan’s idea of building the worlds most complete gadget database. I do love the idea of a social network for gadgets. Howver building the database, I am not so sure crowdsourcing is the best approach for that, I do hope I am wrong I love gdgt.com and I want it to be successful.
Here is my review of gdgt.com, the social network for gadget lovers:
- Gadget Community. gdgt is like twitter for gadget lovers. You can discover people with similar gadget interests and follow them like in twitter. I would like to see a friend finder from email address books, twitter, facebook etc
- Gadget Discussions. The discussion threads around a particular product are great. Though there are 100s different web sites where this already happens however the social aspect to gdgt.com makes this interesting. Think friendfeed discussions versus regular forums. I would like to see a clearer interface where there is a message stream from your followers, your discussions, your gadgets are shown seperately from the complete community. I would like to see an option to follow a gadget category or sub-category. When I want to buy for example a monitor and I am not decided I can follow a monitors category to see all the latest feedback, discussions on monitors.
- Social Widgets. gdgt allows you to save your gadget lists of what you own, what you want to buy etc. Even with our webapp we provided this and I was a huge fan of widgetizing those lists to put on your own blog. I liked the fact that they have this right from the getgo and I already included my widget on this blog!
- Reviews/Ratings. Now you cannot have a gadget site without this! Liked the fact that they differentiated between user reviews and review links. However one thing we did in our app that I see missing is automatic pull of reviews from other places. We did two things, pull user reviews from amazon and epinions.com (via shopping.com affiliation), professional reviews from cnet etc via google custom search.
- Pricing: With pricegrabber affiliation gdgt.com is able to show price comparison for a given gadget. We did this via shopping.com affiliation and in addition we also allowed users to alert of better prices elsewhere by allowing them to publish deals and we also provided results from google custom search of all popular deal sites. I think those would be good additions here.
- Gadget Ads: I love that you can add the gadget in their add to your want list etc. Thats pretty cool. Though their ads are pretty static right now and but I can see that they will have lot more of them and these gadget ads will be lot more dynamic (a monitor ad when I am in a monitors category etc)
- Gadget Database: I am not convinced that users can provide the most comprehensive specs for a gadget. Even I am adding gadgets its fun but not with all those details. Though the specs are optional, the database would be incomplete without all the specs for a gadget. And again the sepcs for a gadget are best obtained from the manufacturer like how Amazon and other retailers obtain. Amazon already has almost complete database of these gadgets. Can you not build a gadget finder using Amazon API ?
Navigation can be made little simpler but I love the overall look and feel and I love the whole concept behind gdgt. The high profile founders got a good start and I sure hope they will succeed. I am sure going to be an active member and postively contribute to the community.
