Reviews are scattered all over the web. When movie review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes launched a few years ago, that basically ended my multiple visits to the NY Times, LA Times, and [insert newspaper site here] whenever a new movie came out. Now, Notches is planning to do the same for everything, by being a free, universal, and open platform for reviews.
The service takes in review data from multiple partners, applications, tools, and even users, aggregates it on a centralized scale, and outputs it in several different ways. By signing up on the notch.es service, users can then browse through this data in multiple ways — by items, categories, users, and products, among other ways.
Other than gathering, the other part of Notches is, of course, outputting. For this, it has an API that lets developers obtain a developer key, and based on the documentation, leverage their database by having full access to it. A lot of web apps can make use of this, and if they do, enrich the platform in the process.
A recent launch, I’ll admit it’s a cool and much needed idea. There are many different reviews sites out there, but they’re all locked into a walled garden, and the standard — rather than the aggregate — has become aligned with the popularity of the site. Notches gives the power back to the reviewer — everyone — and provides the aggregate to anyone who wants to leverage it.
CenterNetworks had some exclusive coverage on the site.
