Being new to mouthshut.com I can make comments both positive and negative about an opinions site (while the thoughts are still fresh in my head - NOTE: this review has been edited and updated)
Firstly my comments are based on my own gut reaction and I have not been influenced by any of mouthshut.com’s advertising or previous comments or reviews, so here they are.
NEGATIVE: first, (so I can end on a sweet note):
’mouthshut’ implies not to speak? Or to pacify, to mute and suppress (like the oppressive Chinese Government..oppss if you don’t hear from me again you know why!) To me it doesn’t make much sense.....perhaps there is a background to this?
Nice concept to award points as an incentive, but how much are MS-Points actually worth? I hope they are not like the Italian Lira where you need a million of them to have any value! I suspect that they will be very low anyway if benchmarked with the competitor sites, but from a engagement point of view, it will upset or make people happy, lose or gain members when mouthshut.com announce a value...bit like floating on the stock exchange! The value will come when Mouthshut.com (hence the 6 month delay) present the numbers of the user base to prospective advertisers or business partners to ascertain a value from which will derive the value of the MS-Points. At the moment, I assume, mouthshut.com doesn’t have an inward revenue flow. Only a ’debt’ of MS-points which it can freely determine the value of. (debt)
Not as professional as it should be, the tables appear to be a bit of a jumble, as the length stretches to fit the amount of text, a lot of table spacing seems odd., some tables almost touch, text also tends to be on the edge of the tables. Home page looks like somebody’s closed their eyes and hoped for the best. Colours are not to my own personal liking but that’s a subjective comment. I don’t know how old the current site is, but it looks like it’s from 3 years back in internet terms. - needs a face lift. Spelling, or grammar mistakes, but this is understandable.
some programming errors with links calling up the wrong database data!! In my own account area I got a data programming error, missing the filter information and email alerts, clicking on to see how many more people jimmy trusted it took me to somebody else’s account area, also missing the most recent 30 opinions and 5 most recent opinions on the homepage. These are examples which happened. Another problem I have is that on long submissions in a text box is very often the text gets cut off without warning..e.g. in the personal profiles, making comments etc. On the Mac OS in Netscape the Mouthshut.com site looks REAL bad, but fortunately not many people use Mac (or Netscape) these are of course not incurable but I only highlighted the fact there are some. Perhaps I was extremely unlucky.
sometimes the speed is fine, sometimes it’s very slow and occasionally the site is not accessable, this is due perhaps of the time differences when mouthshut perform a backup? or trans continental links to the UK being overwhelmed.
to manufacturer sites or peoples homepages are framed in mouthshut.com’s page, bit irritating, would prefer the external link to be a separate pop up window.
points 6. No Warranty and 7. Liability Limits, not enforcable in the UK as it limits a UK consumers legal statutory rights and constitutes an unfair contract if resolved in a UK court of law. Point 12. Governing Law and Arbitration may see otherwise, the Agreement governed by the laws of the Republic of India, but ’between Indian residents’ case for non residents may be settled in their country of residence,
and in any case is only enforcable if the country’s courts deem a ’click’ agreement (by clicking a button on a webpage) as legally binding. (I’m no lawyer and the above is just for reference)
Now for the POSITIVE:
Though in some cases it highlights a word which is correctly spelt.
warns other members of ’perhaps’ unscrupulous characters, though this can be open to abuse
great for distilling the information down into bite sized chunks, i.e who wants to read the Not Recommended ratings?
flexible on and off as you choose for various notifications. Alert me when author writes a review, and alert me when new opinions on the product appear are useful.
hey, you can actually see the pictures (unlike some other opinion sites)
great function to link up people with similar interests.
- WEB PAGE EMAIL THE MEMBER FUNCTION
is useful for quick ’offline’ communications
WOULD LIKE TO SEE:
more MS-Points awarded for the first ’review’ or ’opinion’ (seems like mouthshut.com cannot make up their minds what they are called) of a category, as quite a number of categories are empty. This way they would be filled much faster...how about 1000 MS-Points for the first entry...that will fill them up!
Also the site I feel doesn’t know if it’s an Indian targeted site or an international one. Though I feel it is Indian targeted and for the benefit of the Indian purchasing population. However as we know web technologies at the moment don’t support the Indian language that well, input, output etc and unfortunately the native Indian population have to read and write in English which may not be easy for some and restrict the true potential of the site both in writers and readers. However IF the site is supposed to be internationally focused then I’d say it isn’t international enough, witness the Rupee pricing in the search categories.
That’s the good and bad points out of the way, now on to the actual concept. To provide Indian consumers with purchasing decisions in order to make an informed decision, and at the same time contribute to the reviews for a small token reward of MS points. This function is also combined with a community effort to stimulate discussion and debate and to share similar interests.
However this model is only geared to the more affluent Indian population those who have had an educated background with a grounding in English and those who have internet access. Unfortunately these opinions will not necessarily reflect the lower classes opinions, and perhaps those who need the purchasing information the most, those who can not afford to make a mistake with a purchase, and need to ensure that their Rupees go further.
On the plus side, the more affluent contributing members can sustain the odd purchasing mistake or two, and are the ones who take onboard new technologies first, and can report it first! So the others lower down the purchasing ladder can benefit from their purchase experience! Once internet penetration is greater within India and providing the English can be translated into the native language (if that is desirable and if there are not too many regional variations) then the mouthshut.com resource of information will be very powerful indeed!
Providing a service is one thing, being a sustainable business model with a healthy inward revenue flow is another, advertising on a global scale is going down the pan. The web banner is almost dead and CPM’s have never been so low. Though I feel there may be an isolated case in India, where advertisers are still keen to appeal to the 950 million or so population, this makes the U.S.A’s population of about 250 million VERY insignificant! If more of India comes online then this will dwarf the USA’s and Europe’s internet population put together! (Think market share!).
Large multinationals have always eyed up the two colossal emerging markets India (950 million) and china (1.2 bn) and mouthshut.com is the road to India!