Hip Hip Hurray, Woya has just made it to the top of the most popular bookmarks on Delicious!  I hope it will stay on the chart for a few more hours...

I've noticed some unusual activities on the Google Analytics Dashboard late in the evening.  It turns out that ReadWriteWeb.com has just published an article about Woya on the front page.  Follow the link to read the piece.

Woya is the Mashup of the Day at ProgrammableWeb.com - pleasant news for the the Memorial Day Weekend!

It is about time!  I was expecting a lot more efforts to get the blog up and running but it only took two days.  Not too bad for a first time blogger, right?

You might wonder why the blog looks nothing like the parent site Woya.com.  It's because I haven't got a chance to skin it.  At least the two sites share the same color palette

You might have noticed that some products now have icon right below the its picture (Figure 1).  Clicking on the icon opens up a player which allows you to watch Product Videos (Figure 2).  The same player also shows additional photos of the product.  To switch from videos to photos, click on the icon.  If the icons are not present, it means there is currently no videos or additional photos for the product.  Fuss not - the crawler works 24x7 searching for new videos which are added to the site as soon as they are found.

Have you noticed the Compare to Similar link that appears on some of the product pages?  It leads to information that help you rank product against similar ones.  Let's use a screen-shot from the page of Canon PowerShot SD1100 Camera to illustrate this new feature.

Notice that all of the cameras selected for the comparison share common properties: around 8MP resolution and 3x Optical Zoom.  The Canon ranks the second among a group of nine cameras (the screen-shot is truncated so you only see six cameras) based on a combination price, rating, and popularity.  The chart on top shows plot the cameras based on their price and rating.  As you can see that the Canon is one of the more expensive cameras in the group but it has the highest rating.  To the right side of the chart, three meters demonstrate how well the Canon ranks based on various measurements.  It ranks low for Price because it is expensive; It ranks high for Rating because it has the highest score of 4.5; It also ranks high in popularity.  Overall, the Canon is very competitive in this group.  The table below the chart gives you basic information of the products and they are listed based on their overall ranking in the group.  Low price, great review score and excellent popularity make Samsung the number one choice in the group.

 

I just added a couple of new features to make it a little bit easier to digest product reviews.

First comes the Search and Highlight.  By typing keywords into the search box and hit the search button, reviews that do not contain any of the keywords are removed.  Keywords are highlighted in remaining reviews for easy identification.

The second feature is the Rating Distribution Chart that illustrates the distribution of review scores in a category.  It shows how the review score of the product compares to that of similar products.  Why is this important?  Consider a product with review score of 4.0 out of the maximum score of 5.  Pretty decent product, isn't it?  Not necessarily.  If majority the products in the same category as A have review scores below 4.0, then for sure A is a great product.  However maybe majority of the product have review scores above 4.0.  Then all of a sudden A doesn't look so attractive any more, does it?  The chart makes it easy to spot such facts.

 

Many users have requested repeatedly for adding RSS support to Woya.  For a while I couldn't find time to work on it, but last week I decided to put everything else on hold to get it done!  If you've visited the site today, you probably have noticed the familiar icon sprinkled around.

There are three types of RSS feeds: Top Products, Top Bargains, and Deals of the Day.  Subscription links to Top Products and Bargains feeds are on the home page (Figure 1).  Once you click on the link, the feed configuration panel appears (Figure 2). A number of parameters are available for you to fine-tune the content of the feed.  Using IE7 as an example, Figure 3 shows how the Top Bargains feed looks like.  Deals of the Day feed is product specific and the subscription link can be found on the page of the product you are interested in.  The Top Bargains and Deals of the Day feeds are updated every 15 to 30 minutes, while the Top Products feed is updated on a daily basis.

RSS junkies out there, sorry for the delay and I hope this puts a smile on your face