Viewpoints Review

Viewpoints is a cool site for sharing your opinions on things and for getting real honest opinions from regular people on things.  You can review pretty much anything, products, services, music, movies, restaurants, websites.  

It's very open ended.  You can pick just about anything you have an opinion about and say whatever you want about it.  So many other sites that I've seen that seem to be trying to let people share their opinion are more limiting.  Like they mainly let you rank the product on an overall scale, then rate selected features on a scale.  Sure,that lets you express overall like or dislike of something, but doesn't always explain a lot of the most important things you'd like to say about it.  On a lot of things, there's details that you can't really express with a scale, you need the freedom to write a real review. Plus the full review format helps keep the reviews more useful.  When people can just not like something and give it one star and a one on every scale, you don't know why and it could well be someone who just had a bad experience or had a personal ax to grind.  Having to write a real critique causes posters to have to put a greater effort into explaining why they liked or didn't like something.  This means readers get a better feel for the truth and ratings are more accurate. I like the pros and cons feature for when you're just quickly scanning a review.  If you just really quickly want to see the main things people liked or didn't like about something, you can just check those, and if you have a little more time to spare or want the more in-depth scoop, you can read the full review. 

You can also add your opinion quickly if you agree with an existing review by just clicking the "good point" button or by adding a comment to the review.  So if you agree with what someone else already said, you need not write another complete review that pretty much says the same thing.  You can just agree to theirs.  And if a product you're interested in learning only has one review, but has lots of "good points" agreeing with it you can tell that though only one person took the time to write a whole critique, others feel the same way about it. 

You can build a network of poster's who you like and trust.  You can populate your friends and fans lists with people who's reviews you like and who like you.  The network can be built from other users you come across on the site, as well as friends from outside the site you get to join so that you can see what they think about things.  There's potential there for a very social aspect if you're into that.  But it's not required to be social to still enjoy the site.  Unlike social networking sites like myspace that are only fun if you want to interract with others, viewpoints offers the social features for social folks, but is still fun and useful if you're a loner.  You can fully enjoy it if you like to be an island.

It's fun to discover new products you didn't know about while looking through the reviews,too. 

The site is obviously still growing and has tons of opportunity to become even better as it grows.  Right now, you're really likely to be the first reviewer of a product.  There's a good chance if you're looking for a review on something, it may not have been reviewed yet.  As the site grows, more and more things will have reviews and there will be more and reviews of each product.  While right now it may seem a little sparse in places, as more and more people join and contribute and existing members review more and more things, it will really blossom and become even cooler.