What happens when you wanna know something about a new Web company? Chances are, you'll surf Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, or the new Techmeme to find some reviews about the company.
However, the type of information you will find on those sites is usually fit for experts of the Web industry, since companies are compared to other companies, inside jokes and past events are reminisced, and evaluation criteria are not really consumer oriented.
There are alternatives on the Web though. If you wanna know about a company and know what people think about it, go to buzzshout.com. On Buzzshout, Web entrepreneurs make themselves the entry of their company in the site's directory, and users rate if they like the product or not. It is a great way to discover small Web startups with great potential.
The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of users on the Site rating the companies in the directory. Almost all of the companies have a 3/5 rating, which is kind of confusing.
Another alternative is Killerstartups.com. Behind Killerstartups.com is a team of dedicated testers who obsessively review between 20 and 30 Web startups per day. Moreover, kind of like Buzzshout, people can rate the companies with a Digg-like feature.
Same problem as Buzzshout, All companies seem to have 4-5 "Killers", which makes the site lose a lot of its value.
The problem with those sites is that they totally ignore the PR 2.0 aspect of their activity. First their product relies on users, meaning that they shouldn't focus as much on reviewing a maximum of companies, but they should rather concentrate on bringing more people to the site once one company is reviewed, in order to really add value to their review.
Second, These sites are not accessible. If you wish users to rate products on your site, you have to be close to them. Buzzshout is a great product, but so little people have heard about it, even in the Silicon Valley. I heard about it through words of mouth, instead of conveniently finding it online.
Finally, those sites lack to provide users with extra information that no one else can get from. A twist, a surprise, a plus, cocktails!
There's a huge market there, one that could hold the whole 2.0 by the balls, and one that could generate ridiculously huge amounts of advertising revenues.
On your marks...
