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Derek
One issue we face with PlaceShout, our short-form local reviews site, is that many of the shoutouts may not be relevant to you. If you haven’t been to Nihon in San Francisco, you can’t agree or disagree with Natasha’s shoutout: “Swanky whiskey bar/restaurant. Food was good-small plate Japanese and sushi”.
We recently implemented “Shoutouts You Might Be Interested” functionality to make it more relevant.
Nightly, we scan our database looking for places you’ve been. We find any shoutouts created at those places. These shoutouts are displayed on your personalized homepage, and you can quickly agree, disagree, or pass on each of the shoutouts. There’s a great chance you’ll have an opinion on these places since you’ve already voiced your thoughts on each of them in the past.
Once per week, we email 3 of these shoutouts to you. Directly from the email, you can agree, disagree, or pass:
So far, it’s been very successful. 38% of users have voted on a shoutout from an email. This increased the number of votes on shoutouts by 27% (real-time voting from Scout):
It’s had a great impact for 2 reasons—it keeps our users informed of activity at places they’ve been and it makes browsing and searching PlaceShout better. The most accurate (and least accurate) shoutouts now have significantly more votes.
1 comment
CBQ
When training, I hate using ‘foo’ and ‘bar’ in examples. It means I’m ignoring a major portion of my responsibility—relating the Rails concepts I’m teaching to the problem my students are trying to solve.
For example, let’s say you are training students that are building an application for managing project teams. When teaching RESTful webservices, try explaining how a resourcefully-built web application could provide a free API for retrieving information about the project team members. The team members could be displayed on a totally separate web application by simply exposing these teams of people as bona fide resources.
The example might not be completely relevant – they might not need to connect to other web applications. It might shine light on another problem they need to solve – can we do the same for sharing the project schedules?
In the end, it makes my students more productive. They focus on solving their biggest problems and not just learning all of the Rails concepts.
