History
The behemoth of online retailers, Amazon.com, launched in 1994. The next year, Amazon added user reviews, giving everyone the power to anonymously review any book or product available on the site. A flurry of newspaper stories were printed detailing the horrors of nameless reviewers slathering libel on respected authors, but users loved it. In the same year, Citysearch.com was born as a local city website guide to tourist attractions, restaurants, museums, and retailers (see Figure 7-2). A natural environment for real feedback, it too soon incorporated user reviews.
In the 1979 Blake Edwards movie 10, the main character says that on a scale of 1 to 10, Bo Derek's character is an 11, sparking a "scale of 1 to 10" fad. The idea spread to the Web in the late 1990s with a wave of "ratings" sites, including RateMyProfessors.com (see Figure 7-3), which allows students to submit reviews and numeric ratings of their teachers and professors, and HotOrNot.com, where users rate one another's attractiveness.
Many rating and review sites initially allowed users to post anonymously, but over time, most of them have incorporated a reputation system where users or their individual reviews can be rated on a scale of usefulness or accuracy. Recently, a new kind of review site has emerged that combines local ratings with social networking features. The popular site Yelp.com, launched in 2004, is an example of this type of site.
Figure 7-2. Like Amazon.com, Citysearch.com also incorporates user ...
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