Usage may be various, either online stores that want to add a comparison engine to compare in details features or specifications of their products, or webmasters who want to quickly set up a comparison website on services or products… (including affiliate marketers), or even companies, universities .. who want for their private needs to have a highly flexible, collaborative (editable by many persons) comparison engine, so allowing them to store data associated to various comparison criteria, and easily customizable (for example to compare competitors, suppliers…).

The advantage of using the Pro solution of SocialCompare is firstly, that the solution is easy to implement, it is a turnkey comparison software, easy to use and flexible to suit various needs.
Then if the comparison engine is integrated into an existing site, it is a way to boost your Internet traffic with a SEO Friendly solution, optimized for search engines. You can quickly create content by creating different views of the same comparative data set, according to the criteria or selection of products you are comparing.

All of this content can also be easily used on other websites, including a blog: this will allow you, for example, to create a comparison table and include it in your blog (as possible on the public collaborative comparison engine SocialCompare.com). The advantage is that all such data embedded on external sites will be automatically updated when you update the data in the comparison engine (ie if you update a product price).

Data may be added manually or imported in various formats (XML, CSV, HTML).

The idea is to allow everyone to quickly set up a comparison engine on the web or for private usage.

Join the private beta list today, if you are interested, we will contact you soon, to let you test the solution.

First, if you like SocialCompare’s project, you can click on “Like” button in order to get fresh news about the project via Facebook and be able to participate to discussions.

Before implementing a nice community space on SocialCompare itself, we have opened some dicussions topics on our Facebook page, that enable you to submit your feedbacks on the service, ideas of new features to implement or suggestions of tables to create on SocialCompare, if you do not have time to do it yourself.

Finally you can post any question abot the project on the dedicated topic named “General Questions”. Thanks!

Now, we plan to deliver regularly improvements to the project, and want to build a nice collaborative community to create and share comparisons tables or lists about everything. It is only the beginning of the adventure.

We hope that 2010 has been also a nice year for you, we wish you an Happy New Year 2011 and all the best for your projects, lifes, and mainly for your heatlh..

If you want to take some resolutions in 2011, and want some ideas, we compiled a list of resolutions for the New Year…

After the New Year’s celebration, you could send greetings ecards to all your family and friends, here is a comparison of the main services to send ecards on Internet :

So everyone is able today to use SocialCompare, the platform to create, update comparisons and participate to the community, voting, rating or commenting the content.

You can either register to SocialCompare using an email and password, or use a facebook account.

If you want to watch videos about SocialCompare or a tutorial on how to create a comparison, you can simply read this previous post:Releasing SocialCompare platform to compare everything.

Otherwise, let’s start to discover SocialCompare now !

And do not hesitate to send us your feedbacks

This week we will still keep the invitation token system that allow only users with invitations to register as a member (contact us if you want some…).

Indeed, only members are able to participate to SocialCompare’s community (create, modify comparisons, vote, rate and comment the content..). Then, we plan to open completely the doors to everyone next week.

Meanwhile we will see during this week if we have some interesting feedbacks about the site, and if we need to do some adjustments.

Please do not hesitate to send us your feedbacks about the service and any suggestion to improve it, is welcome!

Below is a quick video to introduce you SocialCompare’s service:

Then another video to show you how to create a comparison table:

If you are interested in our project, we have just launched a facebook page and we will deliver last screenshots, screencasts.. of the service on this page.

Here is small screenshot of the new SocialCompare homepage:

So you just need to click on “Like button” to start to be part of early and informed users. You can also use this space to send us feedbacks!

It will help us to improve our service.

Finally, you can also follow us on our twitter account if you prefer.

1. Vote for best comparisons
   We have added a “vote” button for each comparison. We maintain a counter to do a “Top Comparisons List“. It is now visible on Explore page.

   

2. Simplify the choice for criteria type between 2 possibilities: universal or multilingual data and allow details almost everywhere
   Indeed, now either you choose an universal data (date, numeric, yes/no, brand name, name…) or you choose the “multilingual” data to be able to translate the value for each available language. If the criteria type is universal, the value of the cell and its details will be universal, otherwise in the other case, the value and details will be multilingual.

   

   In the above example, you can see multilingual data (when we display a flag, it is to show the language of the data, you just need to edit it to have the data translated in the current selected interface language. Here all the cells have values (yes, url, video) with an associated detail text (“2007″, “officiel”, “quick tutorial”).

3. List all elements with the ability to delete
   In MySocialCompare tab, we can now see all the elements we have created and we are able to delete them. We have also a new “Trash” tab to restore them.

   

4. A quick tour, tutorial of SocialCompare
   For the moment it is a quick version to take a tour of SocialCompare to see more details about the features of our service. It will be soon enhanced.

Stay tuned for next updates!

The main objective of this website is to provide users the ability to create, maintain and share comparisons easily.

As explained in our previous post, for the moment, we have few content, we need to create more. Indeed, we depend on users generated contents to become a more interesting service on the long-term basis.

For few days, or weeks… (testing phase…) we prefer to limit the registration access and the ability to create, modify comparisons to early-adopters users that request an invitation. Moreover, only members are able to comment comparisons matrix, vote and rate on items contained in the comparative table.

But actually it is quite easy to become a full member (first, it is free of course), you just need to contact us and request an invitation. For that, you can comment on this blog post, tweet us on @socialcompare account, or send us a private message on contact page of socialcompare.com website.

By the way, the video tour (screencast) displayed in the homepage still refers to the first version of SocialCompare, we will try to update it as soon as possible.

Please do not hesitate to test the service, send us feedbacks and also please help us to communicate about this new web service (tweet, post on your blog/facebook…etc).

Thank you!

Actually, we were a bit hesitating to launch the first version that you can see on the screencast in September, because we were not really satisfied about 3 main points that we try to improve before opening the website:

1. Web Design
2. Ergonomy & Technical architecture choices
3. Content / Data

1. Web Design
   Concerning the first point, I consider that we are ready. Of course, as we do bootstrapping, it could not be as perfect, as if we used a real and professional web designer, but this new version looks globally better than the first one. We have mainly changed header, footer and even homepage or other pages appearance. The best thing would be to get a web designer for future versions obviously.
2. Ergonomy & Technical architecture choices
   Second, when we started SocialCompare development, more than one year ago now, we tried to maintain 2 versions for editing comparisons, one with modern, dynamic ergonomy (using javascript technology) and another one using more static, old way to do things. But we changed our mind, we prefer to focus only on 1 version with javascript to have a nice ergonomy of the website and it will be really more easier for us to maintain on the long term basis…
   We profit to redesign a lot of things on technical and database architectures… Therefore as we impact a lot of things in our current version, we decided to wait the end of this redesign to communicate and launch directlty the second version…
   Maybe we will not finish to implement or migrate all the functionalities already available on the first version (such as the comparison basket)… when we will release directly “the second version”… but as soon as possible we will deliver every functionality that deserves to be added on the service, we hope that it will be a lot of improvements and innovations in perspective
3. Content / Data
   Finally concerning the last point that is not satisfying, we will not focus on that, at the beginning, because it is not our priority. We know that this point is really important to attract people to visit our website. We know that we need to add a lot of contents to have more valuable things to do on our service and incite users to spend time and enjoy our service. But we will do that in a second phase, later. Our first priority is to focus on the real new value that we add on the market, that differentiates us from so numerous comparisons websites on Internet :
   • freedom to create easily any comparison from scratch about everything, especially those that are not price comparisons,
   • possibility to reuse existing contents to create easily new comparisons,
   • users community to maintain collective and structured data,
   • possibility to suggest comparisons updates to a private maintainer,
   • …etc…

You will be able to follow the adventure of a new innovative web service on this blog : the building of a community to create and share comparisons.

We plan to talk about the tips and tricks to use better our comparative tool or create easily nice matrix with your own criteria and contents.

We will explain the current features of SocialCompare website and show you new functionnalities that we implement.

This space will also be a place to discuss about new features that would like the community. Any idea,  suggestion or remark is welcome.

We will also post some nice comparison grids that publish the community in order to share and communicate on existing and potentially interesting data to compare.

I hope that you start to be curious to learn a bit more about all this stuff… in another following post ;-P