LouderVoice was the first reviews company to realise the importance of Twitter. That’s why we’re the people behind @review which we launched in June 2007.

Since then we’ve played and tweaked mini-reviews based on user feedback.

Following more research we realised that many people were doing mini-reviews using the simple method of just adding #review on to the end of the tweet. This was also the preferred approach in our recent poll.

Yesterday evening we uploaded the first public beta of our Google Android mobile application to the Android Market.

This is the first Irish Android application and one of the very first reviewing applications on the platform.

You’ll have to patiently wait for the launches of the HTC Magic and Samsung I7500 before  most Irish people can try it out. Anyone living in countries where Android is already live can install it now.

We’re pleased as punch to announce that our brand new customer reviews widget has just gone live on the Bubble Brothers wine site. Julian, their Wine 2.0 guru, has always been at the forefront of social media adoption and the addition of our widget complements all of their other online activities beautifully.

The key thing about the widget is the ease of implementation. One line of code was added to the Bubble Brothers product page template (they use Ecommerce Templates for their site), a few minor logo tweaks later and they were up and running. No development on their side and just some quick colour/size adjustments by us. That’s all it takes to review-enable an entire site!

It’s always a delight to work with like-minded companies so we were doubly pleased when Puddleducks.ie contacted us recently about using the LouderVoice customer reviews system on their site.

Puddleducks is a rapidly growing online retailer of outdoor clothing for both children’s and adults. In fact,  we first encountered them as personal customers of their fantastic products. Their range includes Swedish designed dungarees, jackets and trousers for children, as well as waterproof clothing and work wear for adults.

The LouderVoice customer reviews service is getting a lot of attention from businesses who are looking for ways to retain customers and grow sales in these difficult times.

So the latest research from Avail Intellingence comes as no surprise to us. InternetRetailing reports that the research shows over a third (36%) of respondents rated peer opinions such as recommendations, reviews and customer generated wish lists as the most useful aspect of an Internet-shopping site.

How about adding $2.7B to you bottom line?

Via Econsultancy:

… calculates that, since displaying the most helpful reviews has increased sales in the media products category by 20%, overall this feature was worth $2.7bn to Amazon

Contact business@loudervoice.com if you’d like to hear how reviews can help your business!

Nice piece by John Collins in The Irish Times Innovation magazine today about the iPhone App Store and Android. Quotes from Conor, Pat Phelan and Steve Troughton-Smith.

“An awful lot of developers had no route to market before the App Store came along,” says Conor O’Neill, software industry veteran and managing director of online review site LouderVoice. He cites the case of Steven Troughton-Smith, a 20-year-old Irish student who has sold thousands of copies of his iPhone applications. In the first six days it was available, Speed, an application that shows how fast you’re travelling, was downloaded 36,000 times. The application was free at that time, but now sells for €0.79.

We have two bits of news about our LouderVoice plug-in. The first is that it is now WordPress 2.7 compatible and the second is that we have moved the hosting over to WordPress.org. This means that from now on, when we update it, you’ll see a notification in your WordPress Admin Panel.

Apart from the 2.7 compatibility change, the only other major feature is that you can opt to have all the contextual information about the review, including the stars, at the end of the text. Full instructions in the readme.

Scott Adams nails it beautifully as always.

As you probably know, LouderVoice was the first company to identify Twitter as an important source of reviews. We launched LouderTweets structured reviews all the way back in June 2007. We are also the people behind the @review user.

Whilst many people have used the structured reviews since then, many others have found the structure difficult to remember or just plain awkward.

We turned on free-form reviews on SMS last year and most people are much happier with that. They simply send an SMS to us beginning with “RE” (or one of our partners’ keywords) and the remainder of the review is in whatever style they like.