movie or product, you can use RaveRants to quickly determine whether it’s worth watching or buying.

RaveRants also lets you quickly ask follow-up questions to each tweet’s author. This helps you get more in-depth information about what you're researching.

What it does

RaveRants categorizes tweets into those that are positive on a topic ("raves") and negative on a topic ("rants"). Users can see an overview of the percentage of raves versus percentage of rants to get summary of the reviews. They can also reply to posters, and repost summaries and comments to Twitter and Facebook.

Benefits

Suppose it's Friday night, you're walking downtown, and you'd like to determine which movie to see. If you tried to use a movie rating site like IMDB or Rotten Tomatos, you would have very little content. Why? They don't update in realtime. And they require users to spend a great deal of time crafting their review. It takes time for these reviews to accumulate.

RaveRants is different. It treats tweets as reviews. Reviews accumulate fast, since it's easy to tweet out "I'm hating X movie" when you're still in the theater. RaveRants also indexes reviews in near realtime. This means that RaveRants lets users search on the latest reviews seconds after they occur.

Because of this, RaveRants is ideal for reviews on breaking topics such as recently released movies, TV shows, clubs, books, products, software, games, and web sites.

Another problem with review sites is that they're silo'd. Back to the Friday night example: does it really make sense to visit Yelp to find a restaurant, IMDB for movies, and so on? Not at all.

RaveRants provides a single site for reviews on any topic you can imagine: movies, TV shows, bands, concerts, albums, software, books, political candidates, ballot measures, products, celebrities, cars, restaurants, clubs, airlines, travel destinations, hotels, local businesses, and power tools.

Competition

Because RaveRants can be used so widely, it has a range of competitors, including Yelp, Amazon.com, Epinions, Zagat, IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and Netflix. Direct Twitter sentiment search competitors include Twendz, Twitteratr and tweetfeel.