Sunday, June 4th, 2006

WineThing?

No, I didn’t build “WineThing.” I did think about it once, shortly after LibraryThing was born. I figured I’d stick to books.*

But somebody did it, and did it rather well. The site is Cork’d (corkd.com). I was originally going to blog about WineLog, which also looks good, but I think Cork’d does it slightly better; it’s certainly more elegant (than LibraryThing too). From the Alexa numbers Cork’d and Winelog look locked in battle; it’s unclear who will hit the all important social-software “critical mass.”** There’s also a site called CellarTracker, which appears to hide a lot of functionality beheath the interface of a circa-1999 second-tier ecommerce site.

Cork’d doesn’t do very much yet***, but it does what it does well, and easily. I’m hoping that, as they gain users, they discover the same data richness LibraryThing did. Right now, Cork’d only has manual, user-to-user recommendations. Since I have no friends on the site, I’ll never get any. (Although can follow what I’m drinking via RSS!) I’m sure, when the data gets rich enough, they’ll be able to generate good algorithmic ones as well.

BUT, wouldn’t it be fun if you could link your LibraryThing and Cork’d accounts? Some very simple linking, and we could have “People who read The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman drink.. Gewürtztraminer!”

Sign up, and tell ’em you came from LibraryThing…

*Incidentally, dozens of people have told me they thought of LibraryThing too. The work is in the doing.
**It’s strange they launched so close together. The same happened with LibraryThing and Reader2. Reader2 actually won, briefly, so while the social-software piling effect is important, functionality can trump it.
***Why can’t I upload the label? Wineries would fill it with content in days.

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