Vinfolio Blog

Call me old fashioned, but Steve Gillmor's recent post on TechCrunchIT.com, "Rest in Peace, RSS", describing how Twitter has made RSS irrelevant in the Web 2.0 world we live in, made me yearn for simpler days when your AOL homepage had all the news you needed for the day.

Sure Twitter is cool. It's reshaped how people communicate, stay connected, and keep abreast of the latest news. But I think it may be just a tad premature to be announcing the death of RSS.

RSS came out of Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group in 1995, and was first introduced by Netscape in 1999  (Wikipedia). In other words, RSS has been around a long time in internet years (kind of like dog years, but much shorter). Twitter first came on the scene in 2006. And though all the world's a-twitter with Twitter, let's see how it will fare over time.

In the meanwhile, here at Vinfolio we support both. You can subscribe to a wide range of RSS feeds, from the latest additions to our great wine selection in the wine store, to our CEO's award-winning blog, The Wine Collector. You can also tweet to your heart’s content from our cellar management tool, VinCellar. Tweet your latest tasting notes, your latest additions to your wine cellar, or a wine that's worth checking out.

I will say that Twitter has a great shot at becoming the successor to RSS. Armed with a Twitter aggregator, today's information junkie can have his wine and drink it, too. Twitter marries the social web with the media-driven web. In other words, you can keep track of your friends, your favorite wines, and politics all in one place. Sounds like RSS, but better.

I for one am going to be curious how all of this plays out. In the meantime, I'll be tweeting and RSS-ing at a wine bar near you.

Something's been bothering me for a while now. VinCellar's trust ratings don't add up and sometimes are just plain wrong. A couple of weeks ago I took a look at how we calculate our ratings and noticed that the calculations did not really capture the nuances of tasting notes and voting.

A simple summary of the old algorithm is that it only considered reviews with votes
when deriving a rating for an author. How is this flawed? I'll use an example to illustrate. A user with 20 reviews and one vote is judged solely on that vote. If the vote is positive he's at 100%, if it's negative he's at 0%. What about the other 19 notes? These should count for something.

How our new rating system works

In an attempt to protect authors who have numerous notes (and even those with a few) we've altered the rating system to allow unrated notes to contribute a score to the overall rating. I like to call this the "Innocent until proven guilty" trust rating system. Also all votes on a single review only contribute a score to that review. The algorithm is optimistic in that the score used for unrated notes is the same as if the note was positively rated. Here's a technical view of it:

So, using the same example our user with 20 reviews (1 rated, 19 unrated) would now have the following trust rating:

and using the example of a user with only two reviews, one unrated and one rated, his trust rating would be as follows:

Not too bad. Here's the key point of the algorithm, multiple votes on a single review now only affect that review's contribution to the author's overall trust rating and an author gets the benefit of the doubt on unrated reviews until someone votes on them.

What this means to you

• Trust ratings are fairer - In general, everyone's rating will be higher. All users, prolific or not, will get the same treatment so you can add your first notes without worrying about having a low rating.
• Write more tasting notes- The more reviews you write, the less likely your trust rating is dented by negative reviews.
• Vote more - Votes only count on their corresponding review. Give someone the thumbs up when you like what they have to say, you also won't damage their rating too much if you vote a review down.
• Understand the system -  We know that this algorithm could be more sophisticated and we're open to refinements.

We'd love to hear what you think; you can follow the discussion in the forums. Thanks for your time.

We're very excited to announce the general availability of an iPhone version of VinCellar. This is an iPhone-optimized web site and we've worked very hard to incorporate all the most important features that you've requested.

Here is a brief tour of what you can do on the go: 

• Search and browse wine within the community and your cellar

• Search for tasting notes

• Add tasting notes (and update Twitter if you have it linked to your VinCellar account)

• Add wine to your cellar

• Consume wine

• View public profiles of other users

Due to the space constraints of an iPhone screen we've had to analyze the layout of each page to expose only essential data and features. On the technical side we've also looked closely at performance and have optimized network access for mobile networks. The result is that the site should be accessible and responsive no matter where you are.

How to start using the site now

You can access the new version of the site using your iPhone by going to the regular VinCellar URL: http://vincellar.vinfolio.com

You can find more details and add  your feedback in the following forum post.

Over the last several months we’ve been taking a hard look at performance and have been optimizing pages/actions that take longer than usual. What do we define as usual? We’ve set a benchmark of 500 milliseconds for server processing time as our high watermark.  Anything over that and we try to take a look at to see what we can do. There are some actions that are process intensive and others that depend on third parties but for the most part we should be able bring all actions down to below 500 milliseconds, ideally to around 100 – 200 milliseconds. In December we started recording how long server actions were taking in our database (these are requests for actual data, not images, CSS, or javascript). We then started improving performance for important and/or sluggish actions. One of the first we tackled was “My Cellar”:

                Month                             Avg. (milliseconds)

December 2008                 864

                January 2009                      765

                February 2009                    653

As you can see we’ve made a 20% improvement but we’re still not under the ideal benchmark of 500 milliseconds, so there’s more work to do. Also in January we installed a distributed cache for our domain objects which had the effect of reducing performance a bit. The big benefit, however, is that we now have the ability to scale by adding any number of virtual machines.

We also have made great strides on the CSS and Javascript front as well. In early February we started time stamping links to CSS and Javascript. Now those files have very long expires times and the timestamp only changes when the content inside the file changes. This results in fewer requests from your browser to our servers which improves performance (pages load much faster).

Our engineers having been reading posts on www.highscalability.com about how sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter handle scale and we’ve been applying some of the techniques with pretty good success. Stay tuned for more updates on performance improvements.