How about it? A specialised application for creating and editing reviews on Dooyoo! (dooyoo.co.uk in general)

Member Name: Poison_kitty

Product:	dooyoo.co.uk in general
Date:	11/10/09 (48 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Dooyooers don't stray far from the Dooyoo Environment, many features bespoke to Dooyoo

Disadvantages: none!

I've written a fair number of reviews now, and the method by which I write those reviews are with various standalone programs outside of the Dooyoo environment. Currently I am writing this in Windows Live Writer as that is what I tend to use to write my both my knitting and genealogy blog posts. In the past I have used both Microsoft Word and Open Office Word, which I know is a common practice among most Dooyooers. I used Wordpad for a short time, partly because it was quicker to load than most other writing applications and also because I wanted a way of storing my reviews offline.



It was only for the first week or so when I started writing reviews here that I used the little box on the "Write Your Review!" page. I think we all know it's one great drawback - the lack of spell-check, which when used can turn a good review into a great one. But there are other reasons I don't use it. Sometimes browsers crash - they're not infallible and when they do, you lose everything you were in the middle of. Half way through a crown-potential review is generally when it would happen to ME. A save draft function would of course let a user restore from a previous point, even better if the save draft function also had an auto save. But being able to save reviews before publishing has other uses too. Sometimes you only have the time to get some basic ideas down and would like to expand on them later, but the resultant "Brain Barf" isn't worthy of even an express review. Maybe you have an intermittent internet connection and would like to write a few reviews at a time and publish them at a later date when you do have a connection.



My big idea comes from the blogging world, where i spend a lot of my time. There are a few different blogging applications around at the moment, and they seem to have most of what the average Dooyooer needs. Spellchecker, word-count and a save feature are all pretty standard things, but a good Made-for-Dooyoo application would have to be able to link to the product under review to allow the user to post straight from the application, and also should include all the little boxes you currently need to fill in after pasting your review into the present setup (such as boxes for headline, pro's/con's and summary, and those little star rating thingies for generic reviews, and ratings for other more specialised reviews). To give the application more context, it could contain a (optional) module that retrieves five random unreviewed products, with options to show only those from certain categories.



I'm aware of how important the revenue from advertising on the Dooyoo site is, and for this reason I would remind you of how the Opera browser was funded, and yet was free to the internet community. As I haven't used Opera in a number of years, I cannot vouch for how it is currently done, but when I used to use it there was a banner in the top right of the browser window, possibly using the Google "Adsense" Scheme. I'm sure there are other ways around that problem too.



To summarise, I'm trying to point to a place that the Dooyoo site seems to fall down at, because not only could Dooyoo be losing money as Dooyooers leave the Dooyoo environment to write reviews, but it makes it slightly harder for those who would like to write a review, and sometimes that's all it will take to put the brakes on a review. Dooyoo should join the ranks of websites offering their own applications with their own personalised features to stop users from straying far from the site!

Summary: My thoughtson a Dooyoo Application