Lunch.com, the site that encourages people to share their views and opinions in order to find others with similar interests, has launched an update to its site called Micro Reviews. These are short-form ways of sharing opinions within the Lunch community. What Micro Reviews consist of are thoughts limited to 140 characters or less. They can be shared across the social web, beyond Lunch, to Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.
These short-form comments, shared across the social web, can be linked back to Lunch, enabling the recently launched site to become more of a recognizable resource within the social media realm. Touching on various aspects of social sharing, semantic search and personalized recommendations, Lunch is a unique community dedicated to creating an efficient way of providing information. Since Lunch is still a user-generated site, the team behind Lunch has been rather exacting in building the structure and subsequent process for users on Lunch.
In promoting the best user-generated content for personalized recommendations, the long-standing 80/20 rule isn’t ideal. So Lunch really tries to get all of its users to put forth a bit more effort towards the generation of online content, which is used for knowledge-sharing.
The new Micro Reviews aid in this particular aspect of Lunch’s site because they encourage users on two levels; short-form reviews are easy to create, and the character limitations force users to become more conciose in their thoughts. Lunch has been very specific in its hopes for the Micro Reviews, offering them as entry level ways in which users can begin to comfortably share their thoughts on Lunch’s website. From there, Lunch is hoping that users will work their way up to creating more thoughtful, longer reviews, which are the jewel of Lunch’s website.
Taking a concept that has been popularized by Twitter is smart on Lunch’s part, because a large portion of its potential user base is already familiar with the 140 character limitation. The inclusion of media sharing across multiple social sites also means that even more potential users will be readily encouraged to participate in ongoing opinion-sharing on Lunch’s website.
Building up the knowledge database is a very important part of Lunch’s growth strategy, as its Similarity Network relies on an ever-growing database in order to match users accordingly. The ability to provide recommendations for users and content on an individual level is really the core concept of Lunch’s service, so hopefully the new Micro Reviews will steer users in the right direction.