MouthShut - www.mouthshut.com

Rating: 2/5 stars

Pros: Easy and intuitive to use, Clean interface, Social Networking functions

Cons: Impossible to publish "real" reviews, Accessibility, Overly admin/automatic intervention, "Money" may or not be earned, Privacy concerns

Review: mouthshut is a self proclaimed user review site; for supposedly any kind of products or services, with the twist of offering some social networking options. MouthShut (MS from now on) allegedly makes it's money on ad traffic revenue and also has a user point paying system. The difference in domain name it's almost cosmetic, since they have the same ip addr. It's mainly operational; so they can better track you down, accordingly. Social networking functions are not only available in site; but somewhat integrated into external ones, like facebook.

At first glance it all appears pretty, neat & dandy; until you actually start using the site. Then you'll find the first problem; browser compatibility issues. Granted, is unrealistic to expect that every other one from release 1 would be supported. But relative recent, popular ones gave me some grief. It wasn't just simple added value parts; like the comments; but relevant parts, like review submission itself. Link tags and even simple text link themselves were a nightmare. Sometimes they appeared right, more often than others, do not; with no perceived explanation as to why, whatsoever. Until I found a very disturbing reason; they were checking for appearances in their internal blacklist. This actually goes as far as to block words within strings as naively infantile and just plain ridiculous; to the all very disturbing "epinions". Yes; you read correctly, they consider both "bad" words (lit). But they're obv more afraid that their niche users will find out from within about a "real" review site (EP's overrated anyhow). What does that really say about them..?

Another site/browser problem seems to be logging in and out; login is somewhat easy, logging out (by site) is nearly impossible. Of course clearing the history cookies will effectively sign you out; but that's obv beside(s) the point. It makes sense; since the real issue here, is keeping you busy doing their job; while they idly make a killing. And since presumably there are way better sites; like ReviewCentre; avoid this worthless MS from the get go. Furthermore, some of MS functions are directly taken from epinions; down to their names.

You will also found out very quickly that the also self proclaimed reviewability of any kind of article is also deceitful. As a matter of fact; all of my test reviews were rejected, sometimes with a very dated and brief resulting message, like "update browser"; even though I had prev inquired that it was indeed supported; or "post in blog". Most of the time with no explanation of these "masters of the english language" whatsoever; they remained lost somewhere in unpublished limbo anyways.

Granted; they were also of new products. Yet other people didn't seemed to have any problem adding their reviews. This seemed kind of troublesome, to say the least. The generic problem I see is, proper automatic creation of a one to many function; being one the product or service, many the reviews. So duplicates have to be avoided. The real problem is that is unrealistic. People still will have to manually check out very similar descriptions. The best that I'd do is recommend to the user the near searched matches, and let him/her then edit/create the required fields altogether. An "admin" should only intervene when properly merging (reindexing really) a lot of sim reviews; if needs be. But I digress; sorry.

You may have noticed the previous mentioning of a blog; well, that pretty much is the only quasi good feature of the whole site. It is logical to assume that it was created for alternate unimportant review submittal; which in my case, turned out to be just the only review submittal realistically available. And even more sadly then; one entry was virtually deleted, kept hidden to the public (which was the obv point of letting people know about) and only made visible to the handful of my "friends" (trusted circle); without even notifying me. I must admit that the easy creation of polls was a fun distraction. And the quick mobile updates were a nice touch too. So if you can live without posting reviews; then I guess it's not that bad of a SN site.

I also remember reading somewhere that the virtual money gained while "working" (contributing to the site) there; can be converted to real money and/or stuff. I didn't get to try my virtual money though. I only had a measly ~300+ units. Sending gifts seemed kind of cute; but don't really know about that either (didn't even try it). At least, it's logical to assume that said "currency" can indeed be redeemed irl somehow.

Finally & in conclusion, I must admit; I was duped by MS, they flashed me with their ol bling. That alongside my own eagerness to try it, resulted in me letting slide some serious web warning signs within and outside. Ie, I stupidly let down my guard. I should've not posted anything further until my first real success. And now I hate myself for it. Needless to say; I do not recommend this site to anyone (it obv sucks & I hate it!). It gets it's overall rating mainly from the two salvaging parts of the website fully described; the blog and SN capabilities, one for the blog, half for SN and half for it's look and feel.