Wino 2.0: Part II

recently consumed

web concept: Web 3.0

tasting notes

I was planning to write today about my dream wine site, for the growing population of wine loving Millenials (let’s call them Vinenials). Then I discover a fascinating article that takes a shot at defining the much hated term “Web 3.0″ in a way that has made it tangible for me and digestible for the first time. I had a revelation that the site I was dreaming of was not a wine 2.0 site at all, but is within the realm of Sramana Mitra’s web 3.0 equation. And thus I have been filled with a new love of the previously meaningless term, and now I will share my love.

The components of my ideal wine site would collect all the functions I now do separately and put them in one useful place. Instead of going to Wine Spectator for expert reviews, Cork’d for community reviews, winery web sites for wine labels and pairing suggestions, using Excel to build shopping lists and catalog purchases… I want it all to be centralized, and most of all, I want it make my life more efficient. It needs to help me out in all 4 key behavior categories:

• Browsing
• Hunting/Gathering
• Consuming
• Recalling

Browsing
Rather than having to find time to read numerous wine magazines, online articles, blogs, vlogs, etc, I would want my site to slurp up RSS content from any useful source, and spit it back out at me in a way I find relevant. New and highly rated content should bubble up to the top based on preferences that I set. This could be manual, like say I know I want to start learning about Montepulciano for my upcoming trip to Tuscany. Or it could be tuned into my previous browsing and purchasing behavior, like (formerly known as) The Page You Made on Amazon.com. Or ideally, a combination of both.

I want useful color coding for content buckets (video, articles, ratings, user comments) and the ability to tag content as interesting. There should be landing pages for wineries, varietals, and wine rages with top user voted and top rated wines pushed to the top, with fun related content and images. And even better, why not an Etsy-type whimsical search experience, a swirling spiral of wine flavor profiles (butter, strawberry, grapefruit), or wine label art.

Hunting/Gathering
Search should be highly usable and customizable. This utility should allow the user to determine what attributes (i.e. price, region, fermentation period, featured on my favorite wine vlog) they want to be included in the results page. The user should control all rows, columns, filters, sorting, etc in an intuitive ajax-y fun way that allows them to easily find the wines they are looking for and then repurpose the information. Many sites stop at finding the information, with no thought as to how to get the user to their ultimate goal. Users should be able to “flag” content as interesting, and go back later to read more.

Individual wine pages should draw in from traditional variables (varietal, price, wine region, vintage) as well as not traditional variables such as flavor profile tags, food pairing suggestions (with links to highlighted recipes on allrecipes.com). But more importantly, the wines should pull a variety of ratings from magazines, online databases, user ratings, etc. and create a combined rating and consensus description (a la Rotten Tomatoes). When the user is ready to move into “gathering” mode, they should be able to export or print out the wines they are looking for, which will be conveniently organized by wine region and varietal to make the physical shopping experience easier (Allrecipes does this when creating a grocery list).

Consuming
Once the user has purchased the wines, either via a physical store (zip lookup) or online for the fortunate states, they should have an easy way to identify wines as being part of “my cellar”. My Cellar should integrate with commonly used tools such as CellarTracker. The results of the cellar should be sortable by food pairing matches to make it easy for users to pick out a wine for their nightly meal. It should be easy for users (and encourage) to add notes and ratings about drank wines back into the system. And finally, to make things all the more targeted towards the Vinenials, the users should be able to identify or scan in labels of their bottles and then create a slideshow/thumbnail widget to post on their blogs, MySpace pages, etc.

Recalling
Final stage, users should be able to pull up anything they have drank in the past with the help of the sites usable search tool. They should be able to skim through their notes, and select “favorite” wines that will be utilized to recommend wines that “users who liked this wine also liked this” and set up an alert system that will tell the user when their favorite wines have been written or if the wine is on sale. All users inputed content (reviews, ratings) and behavior (liked these wines, researched these wines, didn’t like these wines) should be pushed back into the environment to make a smarter browser experience for future web users. The site (on an opt-in basis) should offer smart suggestions, suggestions that stay within a comfortable wine zone (price threshold, don’t like sweet wines, etc), but help you to experience new things. Users should be able to socialize with other users within the community, and invite their friends in. Similar to Netflix, users can send each other “wine notes” about wines they thing their friends would like, see how their taste compares to their friends, and see their friends or “trusted users” ratings float to the top of all other user generated wine ratings.

So how does this compare to the Web 3.0 formula:

3C = Content, Commerce, Community | 4th C = Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search

Check on all 6 counts. So what was the point of this exercise? To make everyone dream with me for a moment, of how beautiful this evolving web landscape really can be. Oh the fun, oh the efficiency. Peter Morville told me when he found out I was writing this article:

Just to play devil’s advocate, audience and topic verticals have been the future of the Web since the beginning of the Web…it’s tough to define the topic/audience just right and to change those definitions as people’s interests/behaviors evolve…and to keep up with new technologies and platforms…which is why I would go to Amazon to buy a book about wine rather than a wine 2.0 or 3.0 site…verticals/communities are great but have their limits.

But I read the books and the magazines and the websites, and I say if you make the tools smart enough and useful enough, they will evolve with their audience rather than have their audience grow out of them. So a toast to web 3.0, and the boys at Cork’d and Wine Library TV. Please make my dream a reality.

suggested pairings

• A tangible formula for Web 3.0
• Esty, your place for all things handmade
• Allrecipes, community driven recipes and cooking tips

technorati tags: Web 3.0, Wine Library TV, Gary Vaynerchuk, Millenials