Kävijämäärät jatkavat kasvamistaan, ja olemme nyt ylittäneet mystisen 20.000-kävijää-per-viikko rajan jo kaksi viikkoa peräkkäin.
Kasvun suunta vaikuttaa pysyvältä. Tälläiseltä näytti koko vuosi:
Kiitos kaikille käyttäjille tuesta, kavereille kertomisesta jne! Emme olisi päässeet näin pitkälle ilman teitä.
Tilastoja voi seurata jatkossakin osoitteessa http://www.oindex.fi/listing/site/stats/eatfi/uniikit/
Meille on joskus huomautettu että arvostelijat tulevat varmaan Eat.fi:hin vain valittamaan. Ajattelimme ottaa selvää. Tässä tulokset:
Reilusti yli puolet kehuu ruokaa ja kokemusta. Ainoastaan hinnasta ollaan hieman nirsoja. Siinäkin tapauksessa vain hieman yli 1/4 arvostelijoista ovat sitä mieltä että on oikeasti liian kallista. Hinnan vaikutus näkyy yleisarvosanassa.
Eat.fi:n yleinen keskiarvosana (kaikkien arvostelujen yhteenlaskettu arvosana) on hieman neutraalista positiivisempi:
Miten ravintolanomistaja voi tästä tiedosta hyötyä?
Suurin osa Eat.fi:n arvostelijoista eivät siis tule kiukuspäissään purkaamaan pahaa mieltä, vaan suosittelemaan niitä ravintoloita, josta he erityisesti pitävät. Jos arvosanat jakautuvat yllämainitulla tavalla, voi olettaa, että arvostelut on kirjoitettu ainakin yleisesti ottaen reilulla asenteella. Jos on valitettu jostain, se on oikeasti ollut asiakkaalle tärkeä asia.
Tämän tyyppisen asiakaspalautteen saamisesta pitää yleensä maksaa konsultille maltaita. Se on “puhtaampaa” kuin suoraan ravintolalle annettu palaute, koska yleensä suomalaiset eivät anna negatiivistä palautetta suoraan. He äänestävät jaloillaan, valittavat kavereilleen, eivätkä palaa.
Tietenkin aina löytyy aasiakkaita, ja kaikkia ei voi miellyttää, eikä pitäisikään. (Muut arvostelijat eivät yleensä ota niitä vakavasti, jä äänestävät niitä alas) Mutta jos moni asiakas huomauttaa samasta asiasta, siitä kannattaa ehkä ottaa selvää.
All review sites run the risk of getting gamed, manipulated or abused. The reasons for this are clear and to be expected: a restaurant’s reputation can make or break its business, and there are people who have vested interests in doing one or the other. Motivations to do so are not limited to restaurant owners. There are also vindictive, unreasonable customers who may have personal crusades against certain establishments.
Luckily so far on Eat.fi these kinds of problems have been quite rare. Here’s what we have in place to keep it that way:
1. One review per person. Anonymous users can only review a restaurant from one IP address once. Registered reviewers are allowed one review each for brunch, lunch and dinner. (Needless to say, if a reviewer uses all three, and the restaurant serves neither brunch nor lunch, that account is deleted.)
2. Review ratings: 
Our registered reviewers have been an excellent early warning system, so we provided the ability to give reviews a rating, based on how fair/informative or unfair/suspicious they are. Top reviewers, whose names are in blue, having rated the most restaurants and established a certain amount of clout on the site, get to vote +2/-2. If a rating gets voted down beyond -5, it disappears.
3. Calculating weighted averages: We don’t calculate just the raw average of all the reviews. We weight the average towards what the majority of reviewers think. This means that if a place has ten reviews, nine of them 5-5-5 and one of them 1-1-1, the restaurant does not get a 4.6. That would give that one holdout way too much power. Instead, that one very negative vote gets a lot less influence. In some cases, it gets none at all. This means that anyone wanting to skew the reviews in their favor has to fake a LOT of reviews to change the prevailing opinion. At that point, it becomes pretty obvious to us on the admin side that something fishy is going on.
4. Good old-fashioned spot-checks and deep monitoring. We read the site every day. We notice things, especially user suspicion in the form of negative ratings, or a sudden influx of very high or very low reviews for a single restaurant. On the admin side, we have a lot of tools to cross-reference and examine review sources and trends. Patterns tend to become quite clear, and consequences are doled out accordingly.
5. It’s windy at the top. As a restaurant receives increasingly high ratings, it attracts more attention from both users and admins. If reviews seem fake, and the actual experience is not everything it was promised to be, there’s usually an outcry and very low ratings follow very fast, which tends to do worse for a restaurant’s reputation than if it had just had modest reviews to begin with. We watch for restaurants with conflicted ratings, sudden popularity/unpopularity, and those with a lot of mostly anonymous reviews or registered reviewers with just one review. In our experience, users notice these signals too and negative ratings follow quickly.
6. Consequences: Individual reviews and/or accounts may be disabled or deleted. If suspicious activity on a particular restaurant persists, we may disable reviews entirely for that restaurant, along with a message explaining why we had to do this. If it persists after that, we disable reviews permanently.
The worst consequence of all, however, is the fact that even if we do nothing at all, potential customers can usually tell when reviews are fake. This really makes a restaurant look bad, and there have been a few cases where a restaurant that may have gotten decent reviews otherwise suddenly was reviewed a lot more critically because reviewers were angry that someone was trying to cheat the system.
No system is perfect, and we’re sure that there are, even now, fake reviews on our site. Eat has been designed to make their influence almost nonexistent, so that in order to add enough fake ones to actually change things, you have to add so many that you become much easier to catch.
All of this is intended to create an even and fair playing field for all the restaurant owners, and to make sure users can trust that the vast majority of reviews on our site were written by real customers like themselves.
Much to our surprise, we received an email telling us that we’re not only one of the chosen 15o companies in SIME’s Rising Stars of the North competition, but we’ve also made it to “the Mighty 36” finalists in the first elimination round, along with(among others) Spotify, SoundCloud, JoikuSpot, Muxlim and Zendesk. We’re proud to be listed with companies of that level of quality, and take it as a sign that we’re headed in the right direction.
The jury’s motivation:
“A smart combination of combining reviews, location maps, and tips for wining and dining. Simply a good service for having a good time out.”
From SIME’s website:
“The SIME Awards were created in 1996 to honor excellence in online communication, business practice and technology, recognize the individuals and organizations responsible and inspire the Internet industry of the North to world-class performance.”
“SIME is northern Europe’s largest conference about the Internet and digital opportunities.”
We’re way, way behind on our posting on this blog, we know, we’re sorry. Summer was spent insanely busy tweaking and adding new things to the site. Here’s a quick overview for now—we’ll go into the details in later posts:
We’ve been a bit slow to update this blog, but in case you missed it:
We’d been asked over and over again: “When will you have a mobile site?”
As with everything else on Eat.fi, we didn’t want to rush and make just any old thing. We wanted the mobile version to be screamingly fast, clean, and easy to use, while containing everything it needs yet not a thing too many. A haiku, or bouillon, if you will, of the big Eat.fi. This took time to figure out, but we hope it’s been worth the wait.
1. You can find the mobile site at http://m.eat.fi
Features:
2. iPhone app:
The iPhone version of the mobile site lets you take advantage of GPS to locate restaurants near you as soon as you open the application. It’s currently the most popular free Lifestyle application in the Finnish App Store, and was the most popular free application in general for a while as well, with over 5000 downloads.
3. Nokia S60 Widget:
Our S60 Widget also makes use of the GPS in handsets that have S60 Web Runtime with Platform Services installed. It’s available in the Ovi store starting today!
Eat.fi made it as a Grand One ‘09 finalist in two categories, Best Startup and Best Infodesign! We’re honored and delighted to have made it this far, and will be at the Gala tomorrow, so if you’re there and see us, say hi!
We’re delighted so many of you have taken the time to send us feedback. Here are a bunch of changes we’ve made recently in response to your requests:
And yes. We are working on the mobile site. There’s a functioning beta already, but it’s still missing a bunch of features that we’d like to add before you all start using it and wondering where those features are. If you really really want to start using the beta already, while being fully aware that it is very much still under construction, send us an email and we’ll send you the link.
We’ve finally found a solution. You see, there are only a handful (literally) of totally vegetarian restaurants in all of Finland, so making a category only for them seemed a bit of overkill. There are, however, many restaurants with a variety of good options for vegetarians, but there’s a lot of grey area between having a few leaves of iceberg lettuce in the salad bar and offering a range of vegetarian main courses that really satisfy.
No one person can really list all the places that fulfil this requirement. So we are leaving it up to everyone at once. Every restaurant page now has a voting box in the bottom right hand corner:
As long as more than 50% of the people voting are of the opinion that the restaurant is child friendly or vegetarian friendly, it remains in those categories on the main map page. As soon as the “Yes” votes drop below 50%, the restaurant is removed from the category. This takes into account the fact that restaurant menus, etc can and do change.
In the example to the left, three people believe the restaurant is child friendly, and three believe it is not vegetarian friendly.
We also added the child-friendly category because families with children, like vegetarians, often have a hard time going out to eat, and it is largely the staff ’s willingness and ability to accomodate the family’s needs (the pram, the screaming children, and so on) that makes all the difference. Again, this category is another grey area of opinion, so it is our hope that the combination of for and against votes will result in the greatest accuracy.
We may add other categories later, if demand is high enough. At the moment, we want to be very careful about which categories we add, because each one adds more clutter and makes the site more complicated. As a result we have also set up a category-voting forum, where you can add your wishes for the future.
Some updates we forgot to mention:
1. If you are a registered user, you can now vote on the quality of individual reviews directly on the “recent reviews” page, instead of just on an individual restaurant page. If a review gets over -3 in votes, the system deletes it. We will probably increase this limit later, once voting becomes more frequent.
2. Reviews older than two years are no longer counted in the averages, but remain visible(though greyed-out).
3. We reorganized the city menu to reflect the increase in new cities once we had so many they no longer fit. This included adding a city search field and dividing cities between the largest ones and the rest.
