Have something witty to say about a particular item? Riffs, an ATTAP Technologies company, offers a feature-rich, social bookmarking, recommendation site for information-sharing details about movies, music, fashion and other sorts of interests. With Riffs you can recommend different items by starting a riff, registering and posting a witty comment about a particular item. Alternatively, you can just rant or rave about an existing item by leaving a comment or simply giving an item a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Users can also create and link to webpages associated with specific riffs.
Riffs launched with more than four million items to riff on, including albums, movies, restaurants, events, consumer electronics, games and books. You can add practically anything to Riffs and then you and the rest of the community can riff on it. The most popular riffs are presented on the homepage as well as within its corresponding category. Riffs offers loads of different features, which include RSS feeds for each individual riff and riff profile. Unfortunately, Riffs does not offer category level or popular riff RSS feeds. Riffs also offers users to tag items as a way to organize items. A screen-shot of the “web 2.0” tag is shown below.
Riffs flexes its social networking muscles by enabling profile creation and the collection of contacts or friends therein. Friends can offer up recommended content to other Riff buddies. Additionally, Riff has implemented a music recommendation engine called iSuggest, which offers up automated music recommendations based on your recorded musical taste. iSuggest is a downloadable application that connects your Apple iTunes library to Riffs. It allows you to get music recommendations right where you listen to music and at the same time helps you keep your Riffs music preferences updated. Qloud and Mog are a couple of other services that sync with iTunes in a similar fashion.
Another interesting feature that caught my attention was the ability to import del.icio.us bookmarks into Riffs so that you and the community can further comment on them. I struggle to see how bookmarks play into the granular item riffs that are already in the system, but I guess Riffs is looking to offer content about just anything; so it makes sense. It is a good way to get people to adopt the system and start to use Riffs as a social bookmarking system.
Check out this online Riff demo about setting up your page. Riff has also provided a demo on how to perform the del.icio.us import.
Bottom-line: Riffs offers a simple repository for information about just about anything you can think of and in true web 2.0 fashion it’s powered by user created riffs or content items, recommendations, comments, rants, raves and other item details.
