Riffs is a very nicely executed relook at reviews, another slot in the web 2.0 trend of looking at things that are a good idea but haven’t had a makeover since the dotcom days.
Interestingly enough Riffs founder Bruce Spector was behind one of the original web components – the first online calendar app. someone with enough vision and clout to propel Riifs.
Publishing on the web is becoming standardized the way the browser and search engines standardized Internet based information retrieval.
Before the web, full text search was a relatively obscure area dominated by the likes of Verity. Today the lack of full text search within Windows seems amazing, the web having made it mainstream. Looking at services like Riffs, which make publishing content an almost subconscious activity, something interesting is happening: the interface for publishing is gravitating towards the same interface as search.
Google has a bunch of tabs and a search box, so does riffs. The problem with Google’s tabs is that they are somewhat randomly distributed between what appears on the front page and what trails off into the neverland after the ‘more’ link.
I would bet that this time the publishing tools are going to create the right environment figure out what are some of the new tabs that are eventually going to be standard at the top of Google.
Riffs: Your Social Recommender – Ratings, Rants, Raves, and Reviews