The latest RAYV Gossip went out today.  If you’re not a member of RAYV or don’t subscribe to the newsletter, you can check out the latest edition here:

RAYV Gossip – October 9th 2008

Hey folks, we’re now on Twitter, tweeting away about local recommendations from RAYVers in Sydney.   This is another way to keep up to date with local recommendations when viewing your other favourite sites.   If it happens on RAYV – it’s displayed on Twitter.   You can check out the RAYV Twitter page here. Click to follow us and be updated instantly.   If you don’t have a Twitter account – you can sign up for free here and then add us to the list of people you wish to follow.

If you’re not on Twitter and not the tweeting type, no worries!  If you’re not visiting RAYV every day, you could always add our RAYV Feed to your RSS reader – and be updated every time a new activity occurs on RAYV.

At the end of last week we rolled out a new, much improved RAYV with the first round of changes based on your requests.

We hope this will make RAYV an even better environment for you to discover new businesses in your area and likewise a quicker and effortless place to lay down your thoughts on your personal experiences of businesses across Sydney.

Aside from the new homepage layout (providing more business recommendations across the RAYV categories) and a host of small tweaks to various pages and features, here’s an overview of some of the more prominent features you’ll find across the latest release:

Write a Review & Quick Opinions
We’ve completely overhauled the write a review process.  You can now continue to write a full review (to really get your views across and expressed to other RAYVers) or if you want to just commend a place for providing something like a great service or indeed disregard a place for their poor service, you can do that by just adding a quick opinion.   A quick opinion is just a few words following a pre-defined prefix such as ‘this place is amazing for… ‘ or ‘this place is pricey for…’.  The quick opinion now replaces what used to be the old review title.   To make it easier for you to get your quick opinions into the site, we’ve now placed a shortcut box on the homepage, allowing your to select the business, add the star rating, select the prefix for your opinion, type your opinion, click submit and hey presto – you’re done!

Your opinions also now count as search suggestions for other RAYVers looking for a business of a certain kind.  These will feature in the Popular Suggestions tag cloud on the homepage or on the Popular Suggestions tab on the new Suburb View page.

To make the Write a Review process easier still, we’ve now added a write review box directly into the business listing page.

RAYV Suburb View
Get the bigger picture and find businesses in your suburb with the use of a bigger Google Map and Street View.  Head on over to the RAYV Suburb View page, select the suburb you wish to browse and then either pick a category to browse (such a Restaurants > Pizza), or enter a specific business name or click on the Popular Suggestions tab and choose a suggestion from our other members.  Your search results will appear across the map showing your where in the suburb you have chosen people are currently talking about and reviewing.   All businesses on the map are businesses that have been recommended.

Latest Activity Wall
Get an instant view of the latest activity across RAYV by viewing the Latest Activity wall on the homepage.  We’re currently covering notifications for reviews added, new businesses added and friend connections.   We’ll be adding a heap more notifications soon and opening new ways to interact with this wall.

Activity Feed
Do you use an RSS reader to keep up to date with your favourite sites?  Now you can add the RAYV feed to find out who’s saying what about businesses in Sydney.  We’ll soon be providing a variety of feeds across the site for user profiles, businesses and suburbs, meaning you can not only get the latest activity from the site – specific to what you want (such as your suburb) but it will also allow you to share you reviews across your own sites to your own readers.

SMS me Business Details
You’re running out of the door and you’re scrambling around for a pen to write down the details of the restaurant you’re meant to be meeting your friends at.  Well – not anymore!  Thanks to our friends from Beam Me, you can now visit a business listing page on RAYV, click on the ‘Send to Mobile for Free’ link, enter your mobile phone number and click Send.  Within seconds you’ll receive all of the business details to your phone completely for free!

Refined Search
Not only are we now using predictive search for our suburbs (yes, the annoying drop down menu has now gone!), you can also now search by Surround Suburbs (by ticking the Surrounding Suburbs checkbox in the masthead). We’ve also improved our Narrow By features for search and find reviews and we also now split all search queries across the categories allowing you to quickly find what you’re looking for. Try a search and see what we mean.

I Recommended / Don’t Recommend this business
It’s a simple question, but one that’s quite effective. When you enter a review we now ask you whether you would recommend the business to a friend. Not only does this allow us to identify the most popular businesses across all categories and which ones would be recommended most, but when you visit a business listing page you can now also quickly see how many of the reviewers would actually recommend the business to a friend. This is added decision maker tool to the star rating that is already provided.

Half Stars
How many times have you thought that a business isn’t worth as high as 4 stars but it’s also not worth as a low as 3? Worry no more. We have now implemented a half star system allowing you to select from 0.5 stars upwards to 5 with all the halves  in between!

So there’s no time like the present!  Jump on board and start RAYVing.  Remember, if you don’t have time right now to write full reviews, why not login and whiz through loads of businesses you’ve experienced recently and tag them with your quick opinion.  These can even be one word opinions such as (X is simply amazing for cocktails).  Not only will this help us to build up the Popular Suggestions  for other RAYVers but it’s also a prolific way for you to get your opinions out across the site to other RAYVers looking for someone else’s point of view and recommendation.

Finally – we’d love to know what you think and how you’re getting on with the new features.  Let us know by dropping us a note here.  There’s a host of further new features in the pipeline.  We hope to have these out very soon.

The list was compiled by the Future Exploration Network and vetted by a strict set of criteria.

We rolled in at a respectable number 72 and are working hard on hitting the top 50 for next year. We’re already finalising the development of the next features to hit RAYV and these include some of your more traditional web2.0 features as well as some new innovative ideas. More details on these to be released soon.

You can check out the full Top 100 list here. It’s nice to see a broad variety of sites making the list and more importantly a good amount of innovation coming out of Australia.

Well done to everyone else who made the list!

So go ahead, click away.  Have fun.  Play around.  But most importantly, remember this: if you find a bug, it’s actually a feature (you just don’t realise it yet).  Everything on the site is intentional, even those occassional page not founds and blue screens of death.  All part of our master plan.

Ok, so that’s not true.  Bugs are bugs, and we would greatly appreciate if you would let us know of any you find (this is a Beta site afterall).  You can use the fancy contact us form on the site or just send us an email at info@rayv.com.au.  And you’ll be happy to know I was exaggerating about the blue screens of death - we haven’t found any of those… yet.

I promise every post beyond this one will be a lot funnier and more interesting (I plan to have someone funny and interesting write them as opposed to me!), but for this one it is really important I take a moment to thank Ian McCallam, who pretty much (ok, completely) is responsible for this site being what it is today!  He deserves all the credit.  I just paid for stuff and looked pretty (and if you see my profile pic you can see I didn’t even do that one very well!).  So if you see Ian walking down the street in Sydney (he’ll be the guy with the RAYV sticker on his forehead), please give him a good slap – I mean pat – on the back.

Review away and let your voice be heard Sydney!

- Anil.