The “four out of five star” ranking system is so 2010.
With all the likes, +1, #followfriday, and other popularities popping up in the world of technology, it seems the newest trend is, well, trends. And, just when you thought there wasn’t another way for you to find out which bar your friends are at on a Friday night or which drinks are the most popular, a new social media tool has arrived–Scoville.
The Scoville Scale is the scale used to measure the spiciness or heat of a pepper. The new location-based technology of the same name works in the same way–it ranks the “hotness” of a location by allowing users to recommend places and suggest them to friends. According to their website, the goal of Scoville is “to help our users discover at least one great new place every week.”
Scoville is still in its Beta-version, and is only available to Foursquare users at the moment. After a lengthy, private Beta testing process, Scoville is now available to anyone with a Foursquare account. And, you can even use the Foursquare mobile app to contribute to Scoville. However, they hope to make it available to non-Foursquare users at some point.
Twitter recently started the #followfriday trend, where twitter users recommend other users for their followers to follow. Like Twitter’s #followfriday trend, Scoville has a comparable #toptuesday trend for people to recommend places for any user to view. At the end of the week, Scoville takes all your top places and creates a list of new, interesting places for you to check out, helping you discover new places you never thought to try, or rediscover places you haven’t been to in a while.
Unlike other recommendation functions on other applications, the point of Scoville is to get people out and experiencing new places and trying new things. Instead of simply seeing a video that interests you and liking it or picking a trend and following it, Scoville gets you to actually experience the application. And, by taking the application seriously and putting thought into #toptuesday, you’ll be rewarded in return with places to try, and maybe, add to your #toptuesday list the following week.
