By Conor O'Neill | March 30, 2008
We quietly launched V2 of our LouderVoice on the night before the Irish Blog Awards and have been tweaking for a few weeks. There is a lot more to come but we thought it’d be good to let you know what has changed now since we have a few more announcements coming in the next few days.
The main aim with V2 was to make the activity on the site much more visible to the users and provide more opportunities to interact with others on the site. The most obvious change (apart from the very sexy re-design by Doepud) in that area is that all of the latest/best reviews are visible on every page you visit. We have also added the ability to follow other reviewers so that all of their activity is visible on your logged-in home page on the site.
The number one request from users was the ability to write reviews directly on the site. There are many times when your blog or micro-blog just isn’t the appropriate place to write a particular review and we now support on-site reviewing with Google Maps integration, item images and the ability for others to comment on your reviews. You can now finally save drafts too.
One neat feature is that if you send an SMS review to the site, you can add mapping and image information to it later. Speaking of SMS reviews, you can now sign-up automatically on the site via SMS by simply sending your first review.
Other goodies include avatar image support, a simplified useful/not_useful voting system, lots of small improvements and a more scalable back-end. Of course, as always, we support the collection/publishing of reviews from all the major blog platforms and collection from Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce.
Our popular WordPress plug-in has been totally redesigned from scratch and is a huge improvement. We’ll launch that in the next day or two when test is complete on WordPress 2.5.
What’s coming next? We still have a bunch of buglets to fix and then we’ll be adding improvements to the commenting system, activity stream and some of the RSS feeds on the site. We will add support for some video sites very shortly and some of the Social Networking sites after that.
We are going live very soon with our API on a major partner site. Our SMS customer feedback system with dedicated keywords is also live and you can expect some announcements there too in the short term.
And you wondered why we had been so quiet here!