18/11/05
Riffs: your social recommender
At last, I can finally talk about what I’ve working on for the last 5 months! It’s so hard to work in stealth mode, and when everyone asks you why you’re so busy, you have to say “a thing”. Anyway, today, Riffs has gone live in ‘public alpha’ mode.
Riffs is a recommendations engine, a place to rant and rave about anything, recommend and get recommendations. My main use for it will probably be to give music recommendations, but you could use it to rate and review a gig, movie, conference or meal you’ve just had. Perhaps you want to get users opinions of a certain digital camera? While this is the early life of riffs, there are already over 10 million items in the database, and we’ve tried to make the process of adding a new item as quick and easy as possible.
There’s also the social network side of riffs. If you see someone with similar tastes you, add them to your riffrs, and keep up to date with what they’re reviewing. There’s a lot going on in there, but i wanted to give you a brief overview.
As this is an Alpha stage, yes, there are rough edges, and many changes/improvements/code cleaning still to come. Its there to try out, give feedback and help advance. Open Firefox/Camino/Flock/IE if you must, get stuck in and have a play around. (Please feedback to Attap though!). Safari support is coming very soon!
While I was worried about the scrutiny that the code is going to get, I decided sod it. I’ve worked long and hard on this site, and the Attap team much more so. I’m proud to have got to this stage, and really want to show you all what I’ve been up to for so long. I see that 37 Signals have picked up on it already (i’m glad the logo rollover tickled their fancy so much!).
Oh, about that font. Its VAG rounded, which I did use on another project. My lesson learnt is never to include it in any more design options. In the case of Riffs/Attap though, it felt the most applicable though, so I make no apologies! I’m still desperate to use Omnes on a project though.
There are lots of CSS things I want to write about, like the fact that Firefox 1.07 threw up so many problems compared to 1.5, or the odd IE fix that saved my bacon at the last hurdle. they can wait for when there’s more time.
This is the just one of the projects I’m working with Attap on, there’s more to come…
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Trajan said 909 days ago:
looks promising.
Justin Williams said 909 days ago:
Has Safari not penetrated the market enough to be supported at launch?
Andrew Hamann said 909 days ago:
Sounds cool. Wish it supported Safari though…
Allan R. said 909 days ago:
first impression: user-friendly, concise, can’t find an immediate use for my web 2.0 needs but i’m sure i’ll find some interesting riffs in a while…
nice!
Jon Hicks said 909 days ago:
Its not to do with market penetration. Some ajax/javscript is just plain hard to get working in Safari, its as simple as that. Most new Google stuff doesn’t work in Safari right from the start.
Having said that – it might only be another week for safari support to come. Believe me, I want it too!
Kenny Smith said 909 days ago:
Very cool idea! congratulations!
But no safari support!?
Dude!?
Brutal said 909 days ago:
This looks really cool! I’ll be playing around with it a little.
(Looking forward to the Safari-support though)
Drew McLellan said 909 days ago:
Most of it seems to work fine in Safari, spoofed as IE :)
I don’t really get it though.
Geoffrey Aladro said 909 days ago:
That is really nice looking. Seems like a good idea. I hope it catches on.
Kim Siever said 909 days ago:
It’s cool, Jon. One bug though. I added a book by Pearl S. Buck, but when I save it, it seems to remove “Buck” from the details. It’s like it removes everything after the period.
Horst Gutmann said 909 days ago:
Looks really nice :) I esp. like the AJAX-pagination. Just one thing: Are UMD Movies really … Games? ;)
paul haine said 909 days ago:
RIFFS!
YEAH RIGHT!
The Warriors is such a good film.
head_zoo_keeper said 909 days ago:
Yes, after spoofing as Mozilla 1.1 with Safari to get in just to check it out, it looks great. And I’m sure you’ll be the first to let us know when Safari 2.0+ will be supported.
I really like the icons, too… did you design those?
David Bjorgen said 909 days ago:
Definitely in alpha mode. I added a riff and recognized a handful of annoying quirks in the process. The site looks clean and the UI is intuative, if not lacking a few goodies here and there. Fun to play with, but like some others, I’m not sure how useful this will be in the long run.
eric said 909 days ago:
Very slick, both graphically and functionally – it’ll be a regular for a while, hopefully staying that way.
I see your head tilting fun found its way over, too!
Dudu Figueiredo said 909 days ago:
It’s definitely something new. A new concept of shared content.
chuanz said 909 days ago:
Seems to work with Opera spoofed. Why block?
eric said 909 days ago:
Probably making sure any niggling bugs are worked out. I’ve used it in Camino, Flock, and Safari (spoofed to moz 1.1) – and Safari definitely showed some ajax errors and the like.
LeoPetr said 909 days ago:
[insert Opera user griping here]
I can’t even use the theoretical contact form to complain because it’s also blocked.:-/
Anthony Baker said 909 days ago:
Very nice. Great work, Jon.
Noticed that the app seems to be based off of some super-charged wiki. Would love to hear more about that aspect of the service, if you could talk more about it. Very, very nifty.
Thomas Scholz said 909 days ago:
Please drop a note in your feed when you stop blocking Opera! Thanks.
Christian said 909 days ago:
Really smooth! I like it.
Had problems with the Comment posting field in Camino- wasn’t able to write below the title.
Zach Inglis said 909 days ago:
Congratulations. I know what you mean about hating not to tell anyone. Presume thats why you were so busy the other night?
I shall have a play with this I think.
Paul D said 908 days ago:
My complaints after a few minutes of use:
1. It doesn’t work in Safari (has to be said, even if you’re fixing it).
2. The “rants” and “raves” tabs on my home page look like ajax-driven web app tabs, but actually function like regular links that slowly reload the whole page and clutter up my history list.
3. Recommendations on my page don’t seem to be related to the products I’m interested in (information that could be gleaned from my rave voting, much like the way Amazon works). What’s even worse, products I have voted thumbs-down on still appear on my recommendations list.
John said 908 days ago:
Certainly an interesting idea, but I find myself ‘diving’ into things while browsing around. Of course you could argue that I’m new to the application, but I don’t think it’s completely intuitive just yet. The search feature is currently confusing me to no end (Does it work on tags, by the way?) and the sheer volume of information being thrown at me with every click of the mouse is rather overwhelming, while the actual riffs require another click to be revealed.
Anyway, great idea, and a nice implementation. I wish you the best of luck!
Mike D. said 908 days ago:
I’m not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but did you know it doesn’t work in Safari?
Seriously though… great looking site. Can’t wait to use it.
Mike D. said 908 days ago:
Damn, Textpattern stripped out the faux-html-comment “end sarcasm” between the first and second paragraphs of my comment above. I even escaped it correctly!
Charlie said 908 days ago:
Looks like an interesting concept, I was thinking (day-dreaming) of building something along the same lines, but based entirely on companies that give good customer service; review the company, rather than the product so to speak. But I guess you could just do that with riffs anyway. One question for you, where did you get the 10 million existing items from, I’m guessing you didn’t lock up an a secret army of reviewers and feed them 10 million products, is it based on amazon reviews and ratings? or something far cleverer?
Edward J. S. Atkinson said 908 days ago:
Constructive criticsm of items you wish to change goes to:
http://riffs.com/doc.cgi?section=contact
Not Jon.
Jon, it looks like it carries great potential, it looks snazzy, and it looks rather tasty. And my oh my, you sure do like that font!
For now, you deserve a healthy dish of kudos (available at your local Quickie-mart).
Devlin Palmer said 908 days ago:
Looks very good, I look forward to using it.
Devlin Palmer said 908 days ago:
Sorry, addition. It won’t let me create a new account, there is an error in the Javascript of the checkbox. Firefox Console says logged_in not defined.
Matt Robin said 908 days ago:
This looks like a really intriguing social-app Jon…I’ll give it a go when there’s a beta up and running (and I’ll be late to it by then!)
Will their be ‘riffs’ t-shirts too? (The ‘must have’ for 2006?) :)
Erwin Heiser said 908 days ago:
Auch!!
No Safari support?
Coming from you Mr. Hicks that is a major disappointment.
I’m sorry I just feel like I’ve been kicked in the nuts :-)
domain said 908 days ago:
hi Jon,
congratulations to Riffs public alpha mode!
Safari however like always makes problems ;-(
but perhaps you can repair that ?
Matt Lindop said 908 days ago:
Nice work, Jon.
That font looks strangely reminicent of another of your finest!
Jon Hicks said 908 days ago:
Coming from you Mr. Hicks that is a major disappointment.
I’m sorry I just feel like I’ve been kicked in the nuts :-)â€
but perhaps you can repair that ?â€
Yeah of course I can, because I’m not only the designer, but the development team as well.
Safari users, please, read my post, and comment #5.
paul haine said 908 days ago:
Hey Jon, did you know it doesn’t work in Safari?
Todd Warfel said 908 days ago:
Well, I”d like to leave them feedback, but since they consider Safari an invalid browser for the entire site, even the contact page, I can’t even leave them a feedback comment asking for Safari support – that sucks.
The idea sounds good and I’m sure I’ll try it out once Safari is supported. But this should be a lesson that even if you don’t support a particular browser, you should support all of them for the contact pages.
Max said 907 days ago:
Nice… actually, I had an idea for a site like this a while back. I was going to call it rateeverything.com. You guys pulled it off better than I ever could have, though. Riffs has made its way onto my “visit often” list.
Nice Paul said 907 days ago:
Interesting concept, not sure how useful it’d be or how much I’d go back to it – I guess that depends on how it evolves. It already suffers from one of the problems with tagging, whereby earlier items become more and more popular, and new items get lost because they will never catch up enough to make the first page. One to watch.
Good work on the implementation though, Jon!
Jørgen Arnor Gårdsø Lom said 907 days ago:
Just a reply to comment #2; YES! Apple is coming up in the world; especially amongst creative professionals – and when Jon does something; who comes to see?
Creative professionals and alike! Mac-users, Safari-users, good people!
Jakob Heuser said 907 days ago:
Awesome work Jon! It’s interesting to see the development of several community/social networking site themed around a primary focus. I’d be really interested to see how the community growth does since a project like this depends on reaching a critical mass of passive and active audiences.
I think my personal favorite technology employed is the live chatting about a topic. It’s integrated in such a way that at the point of mass, there will always be somebody talking about something on the site.
Safari will come with time, it always does. What someone needs to do is build an HTML->Node translator. You give it a string of html in javascript, and it will build your DOM node structure for you. Oh, the hours that would save of agony and development…
eric said 907 days ago:
After using it for several days, I’ve come to the following conclusion. And no, not a bug report, yes, I’ve submitted this to the dev team. I’m just curious if this is only happening to me:
the music picks are awful. They’re designed for bizarro Eric. They’re basically the exact opposite of my musical taste, and I’m dutifully rating every single one I hate thumbs down. All it’s doing is producing even more awful music. Creed? Incubus? Jessica Simpson? Linkin Park?
Very discouraging side to an otherwise great web app.
Oh, also – anyone in Camino noticing that it’s eating cpu like mad?
Tom said 907 days ago:
I honestly cannot see the point, and I agree the picks are terrible.
Edward J. S. Atkinson said 907 days ago:
All righty. Let’s review the facts here, you parochial bunch of designers. How many people use Safari? Right. Just you. Hey, I use it too! But is Riffs a designer app? Nuh-uh! Open thine minds, scallywags!
Boris said 907 days ago:
“Sorry, we don’t currently support your browser. For the best riffs experience, please try any one of the browsers below:”
Funny, I’m in Camino. Oh I know, I added a custom greeting to my user-agent string (but I kept the technical info intact).
My options? Despise firefox. Won’t touch Flock. On a mac so happily don’t have to touch IE. Hrm.. not very “all things for all people”...
To go off on a tangent… what saddens me about all this Web 2.0 madness is after all the hard work evangelising standards AND (and and and) accessibility for so many years, we seem to be throwing it all out the window in the name of “the full promise of the web”. Funny, “the full promise of the web” is exactly what the W3C and it’s recommendations is all about, and it does it with solid standards, practices AND totally pervasive accessibility. Have you all forgetten that? Sigh.
Mozilla is the new Internet Explorer, just like “Google is the new Microsoft”. ;)
/rant
Jon Hicks said 907 days ago:
@ Boris – Odd that your Camino user agent string doesn’t work. Once the Safari support comes in, I want them to remove the browser sniffing anyway. I don’t like it, but there were good reasons to have it at this stage.
Now then, ‘Web 2.0’. I never declared Riffs as a ‘Web 2.0’ app. Sure it has some of the hallmarks, but I deliberately never used that term, as isn’t a ‘Web 2.0’ app – at least not yet. Anything that gets tagged with that name gets an instant beating it seems. If you have specific comments on Riffs regarding ‘W3C Recommendations’ I would like to hear them – thats specifically the kind of the feedback I want to get.
I’ve already stated that I need to do some code cleaning (I haven’t looked at it in a validator yet), as we needed to get the app working first. There’s no point in validating and then doing more work, as you’d more than likely just have to go through the whole process again. Waste of time.
As I said, if you have particular comments/complaints to make about Riffs concerning web standards, I’d like to hear them.
For those who couldn’t send feedback because their browser was rejected, sorry about that. However, if the feedback was just to say ‘Open it up for Safari please!”, then it wouldn’t have mattered. As I’ve already said, it will work in Safari very soon, hopefully by the end of this week. Its being worked on as I write.
Rich Leland said 907 days ago:
Another cool addition to the social web. Love the collaborative nature of these types of projects. I think you’ve got it off to a good start, and the design is nice, clean, and simple. With tweaks and focus on resolving some of the items listed above, this could be a great resource.
M.e. said 906 days ago:
Will you also turn on OmniWeb support when you turn on Safari? I’d like that.
Jon Hicks said 906 days ago:
Can’t be 100% sure to be honest. Omniweb has problems with Flickr’s javascript, as it still uses an older version of webcore, and we might suffer the same way. When Omniweb move over to webkit it should solve that anyway.
Marko said 906 days ago:
This thing is great I especially like the Ajax chat boxes !
Tinus said 906 days ago:
The design doesn’t fit the logo
Kyle said 905 days ago:
This is fun. Though I wish I could remove a rave. I accidentally clicked “thumbs up” on a product and it was the wrong one. I’d like to have that removed from “my riffs”.
Also, a feature request: give me categories or lists. I want to collect all the components in my new custom build PC together. Or I want to collect my favorite albums. These are lists I might want to share with friends.
Paul Williams - ceo - iKarma.com said 905 days ago:
Very cool! I love it!
Alan Orozco said 904 days ago:
That’s gonna be real cool! Now everyone is going to know our websites! ;)
riff said 902 days ago:
I’m guessing I’ll be safe with my domains, theriffhimself.net and riffst3r.com ?
I can’t believe my nickname’s being whored out like this. I should sue. Or order pizza..
Andy said 901 days ago:
I think the thing that may bug me the most is the icon. The ol’ thumbs up has become way to literal, and three small inset white lines seem a little bit off, too sharp in a softer design.
Eric Meyer said 900 days ago:
Being a Safari user, the site still tells me to sod off, so I’ll have to ask here: are the recommendations published using the hReview microformat? And if not, any chance of getting them in said format in the near future? It sounds like it’s a natural fit.