Inspiration
Yelp is great for restaurants and AngiesList is great for services, but no one really excels at reviewing reviewing them altogether. We wanted to create one platform that reviewed everything from music and nightclubs to restaurants and services, in a similar fashion to what stackexchange did with question and answer topics for a variety of disciplines.
How it works
Simply pick one of the primary categories, i.e. "food" or "gaming", and you will be taken to a subdomain with tons of items from that category. With a built-in search and filtering feature, you can search for a particular topic of interest and get crowd-sourced rankings and reviews for a variety of items. For example, a simple search of "Aloe Blacc" in the "Music" subdomain would pull up a list of ratings and reviews of everything from albums to concerts, letting you know how good the most recent album was or how well a given artist puts on their live show.
Challenges I ran into
When building a crowd-sourcing application at a hackathon, you run into the challenge of generating initial content before receiving user reviews. We used a combination of sample content as well as rankings and reviews already posted online to populate our initial rankings, and we will shift this towards crowd-sourced reviews in the future.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
By building the entire application in a combination of Meteor and Angular (new platforms that we had to learn during the course of LAHacks), we were able to accomplish a lot of awesome things. Namely, because our system uses websockets to handle data transmission, we will be able to write hot code pushes as opposed to restarting our server every time we want to modify something in the future. Users will also notice the benefits of our websockets system when they post content, as their posts will update immediately on everyone else's browser when posted, even taking latency compensation into account. By taking the time to build a strong, fast, and scalable framework, we think we have established the basis for an amazing user experience.
What I learned
We used two frameworks, Meteor and Angular, that were new to us before the hackathon began, so this obviously came with a learning curve. Furthermore, when trying to generate initial website content, we found out about many great review websites as well as great APIs like Mashape that helped us deliver more meaningful and actionable reviews of our items.
What's next for RaView
We need to gather sufficient crowd-sourced data to build out our review system so that it has momentum to be self-sustaining. This will require a blend of marketing and technological enhancement to support the ease of review submission.
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