Article rating

We are still not sure which of the two ideas we will work on. To have a better idea of which one will become our final project, we decided to do a little more work on both of them before deciding. In this post the news-rating system will be explained, the one about dataminer is already here.

The basic idea is that we want people to be able to comment on the news and share it with their friends. We would add a box on news sites, where you can directly see what your friends thought of the article you are viewing. You can also add your own comments and ratings there, or even click a button to see some related articles on different news-sites. 

Here is a mockup-picture of what it could look like:

A second part of our program would give users the possibility to see all of their friends comments on the news of that day and give comments on the comments, read the articles their friends liked or read similar articles. The comments could be sorted by news-category, rating given to the article,...

Both features would contain the same data, so the user can choose to only use one of the features, or both. 

The good side of choosing this idea is that there is a big public able to use it. Even our moms could use this kind of software, while they won't start playing games. That gives us a varied test public when we make changes and it is easier to evaluate if our changes were good.

The down side is that it isn't very original and that it is only useful if many of your friends also use this. The mining game won't have that problem, as it is also playable when you are alone.

We will discuss which idea seems best for everyone in the coming days.