I invested in Judy’s Book around Thanksgiving and wrote a long post about why I made the investment. Earlier this week, Judy’s Book rolled out a major release which we’ve been fondly referring to “the facelift.” The front end is significantly changed (and improved based on user feedback) as are a bunch of things under the hood. In addition – like many good “early versions” – there were a lot of architectural changes made to make it much easier to rapidly roll out new functionality now that we have a pretty good sense of where we are going.
For the techies in the audience, we’re now supporting WOPM (“write once publish many”) where you can create a review in Judy’s Book and have it published automagically on your blog (TypePad, LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type are currently supported). Oh – and these are formatted using the hReview microformat (hmmm – wonder where we are going with that? – remember – I said we made architectural changes to make it easier to roll out new functionality.) There are plenty of RSS feeds easily discoverable to see what people are writing about in each city in the US, or – if you just want to see what a particular person is writing about, you can subscribe to their feed also. Members get their own pages with a user-definable URL – think “platform” for this if you want a sense of where things are going.
For the non-techies (and techies) in the audience, give it a whirl and give us feedback. We are providing some financial incentives over the next three weeks – $100 gift certificate each day to the person that writes the most new reviews that day – so don’t be bashful.