Image by Likaholix via CrunchBase
I have been playing with Likaholix for the last week, and have ended up really enjoying the web site and the potential that it creates for people to share the things they do like. This is so much better than Yelp, and without all the drama that Yelp represents. Quite simply it is the best product like site I have found yet, and better yet, it is controversy free.
For people who are following the problems with Yelp offering to remove negative feedbacks for a fee or otherwise manipulating the results of user offered reviews of things they like finding a good alternative to Yelp has been difficult. Likaholix though offers a great solution to crowd sourced reviews without any taint of manipulation. While it is not generally as popular or as well known as Yelp – Likaholix has much to offer people who just want to read and write fair reviews of the things they are interested in or places they have gone that offer exceptional service.
Likaholix is the brainchild of two former Google’s Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan. Both worked on Google Docs, Gmail and other Google systems that we take advantage of every day. What is nice is that Bindu and Arvind brought that same clean interface design to Likaholix meaning the web site is obvious, anyone should be able to simply jump in and start doing things right off the bat. With the tie into Facebook and Twitter, you can share your likes on a bigger scale with all your friends (in my case hundreds of friends) out on the other social networks. Of course, this helps Likaholix because they get a ton more links back to their web site for people to read what is being said about a product or service.
Likaholix integrates with Wikipedia and other sources including the internet to help find direct links back to the sites that you are talking about. If you are writing about some obscure comic book (which I have been using Likaholix for this week) they can usually find information and bring that back to the Likaholix web site to help flesh out the story and provide a link back to the source so you can read more than what I have to say about said product or service.
The other very cool thing is that you can also bring back in your Amazon reviews – I am an avid reviewer of books on Amazon including being a member of the Vine program. Likaholix brought in all 156 reviews that I have written on Amazon and then plugged that into their system. What was interesting about the Amazon pull was that it only brought in the 4 and 5 star reviews, and not the books I didn’t like.
The reward system in terms of points is also a nice way of rewarding people for participating in the system. For people who sign up you can also donate money to a charity of your choice. There is no obvious money making process here. The focus is on reviews and what people really think of various services and products. Users are rewarded with participation points, which is a great way of getting users to provide more material for the web site.
Simply Likaholix is an elegant solution to crowd sourced reviews of products and services. The clean simple interface is easy to use and immediately understandable. This is one web site that I have really grown to enjoy over the last week and this just became part of my daily routine. Much easier than Facebook fan pages, Bindu and Arvind have created a wonderful way to share what we think of places we go, and just shows the upside of that experience.
FTC Disclosure – no one knew I was going to write this – uncompensated anyone can sign up for a free account on Likaholix and go to it.
Related articles by Zemanta
- What Do You Like? (chris.pirillo.com)
- Social Site, Likaholix, Doing It Right (dailyslackr.com)
- Will Customer Opinion Overtake Search? (socialmediatoday.com)
(Cross-posted @ TechWag)
