Disclaimer: I am the ProductLayer Developer Evangelist. My job is to convince you to build apps using our platform. Contact me if you have any questions.
Have you ever tweeted about a product that has you excited? Have you ever posted about a product on Facebook that really annoys you? Are you a “digital native” who feels right at home in social networks, keeping loose contacts with your friends and business associates?
Until today, whenever you would post something to a social network, this information would drown in the flood of other people’s posts. There was no way of finding other people’s opinions about physical products, except perhaps Amazon product reviews. But wouldn’t you trust more your friend’s opinions than those of complete strangers?
Today ProductLayer announces solutions to the problems above. We proudly present: prod.ly – a social network on which your friends share their opinions on various physical products.
prod.ly is pronounced “proudly” because we believe that people want to share their product experiences if they are proud about their purchase. If they are exhilarated by the quality of an item, the great value for money or the way an item boosts their social status, they will want to share this with their friends in a lasting way.
Every product – which is identified by a globally unique barcode – has its own home page on prod.ly. Our vision is that in the not so distant future those product microsites will be the place for people to go to find more information about specific products. Instead of liking some generic page on Facebook you will be able to attach your liking or disliking to the product in question. You will be able to see photos that your friends and other user are sharing, showing products from different angles and in various situations. You see product information curated by your friends, which could help you with your buying decision. You see opinions and reviews about those products. What do you love?
We understand that users will rarely want to post a full-on product review. We believe that short emotional statements – akin to tweets – will be what the users of prod.ly will want to share. We call these “opines”. prod.ly enables you to share opines as well as full-on product reviews. Where you see some info missing, you can simply add it, to the benefit of all other users.
prod.ly is powered by the distributed product database by ProductLayer.com. A free API gives developers access to this product information – including user interactions – from any mobile app or website. prod.ly is the user-facing web front-end to ProductLayer. We are looking for development partners to build the social client apps which would tap into this new social network.
Today we are soft-launching prod.ly as a public BETA. Users can sign up for a free user account on the website. We’d love to hear from you, you are welcome to share your impressions and comments with us.
Categories: Business
