The Adegga Blog

We keep making small improvements to make adegga even better!

Better, Faster, Stronger
We’ve improved a lot of small details that will make navigating adegga so much faster. As an example our new homepage is loading 4 times faster and a typical wine page will load twice as fast as it used to. All thanks to the tips taken from this optimization best practices article of the performance team at Yahoo.

Homepage update (now with wine regions)
We’ve also updated the homepage with small design details and a new improved wine region navigation that lets you easily browse wine regions for each country. If you’re using Adegga from Portugal this is how it looks:

Share this wine
More and more people are bookmarking and sharing a wine from adegga on Twitter (btw, here’s our twitter account). So we’ve added something that will save you some time when sharing each wine. Using these buttons you can easily jump to the site of your choice with the url of the wine (sometimes with the wine name too). Besides Twitter and del.icio.us it also works on facebook, Google Bookmarks and Furl. (if you would you like us to add another service let us know).

iPhone icon
And last (but not least) as requested by Diogo we’ve added a specific icon for the iPhone. When you bookmark adegga on the iPhone you’ll be able to automatically use the typical adegga icon and then comfortably use our mobile version:

A little bit later than usual but here we are to wish you an splendid 2009 with lots and lots of wine (buying, drinking and selling)!

I have a couple of quick updates:

• We’ve spent December mostly fixing little bugs. After we launched the new homepage and change home to a new server we have have been ironing out a few issues here and there. If you see anything not working let us know via this feedback box!
• Christmas was crazy as usual as everyone is searching for wine online (isn’t wine a lovely gift!). We had a spike on traffic with a lot of new users joining the community. Welcome to you all!
• Our video is a bit delayed. Some people desperately want to participate but took a little longer to send their videos and made us a little late. No worries. A couple more days and it will come out! Promise.

I’ll be back soon with some exciting posts!

Yes, it’s true. We have a brand new homepage!

Adegga is a wine community so it was time we designed a homepage that shows exactly that. The new homepage shows what adegga members are doing, top wines per country and much more.
Go on, take a look!

We’ve also improved search and added the ability to browse wines per type, country and vintage (bottom of the homepage). For example you can see Top wines from Portugal or Top wanted wines from Spain.

Here’s a screenshot of the new homepage:

Wines lists are usually ordered using ratings. On a community like adegga this has two problems: 1) it assumes everyone is rating wines and 2) is assumes that ratings scales are all used equally. Neither of this points are true and so we decided to create a new way to rank wines based on their social activity.

The Winerank is basically a new way to measure the level of interestingness of a wine and it is based on the actions taken by the community members on each wine.

The winerank for each wine is calculated using an algorithm that includes many wine properties: we included the wine’s average rating, the number of written wine notes, the number of times the wine was selected as a favourite, how many people added the wine to their wishlist, the number of people who have the wine in their cellars and a few more properties. On top of these we add weights to each property in order to bring out the best results.

The Winerank evolves with the community as more people add their ratings, favourites, wishes, etc. The overall ranking is re-calculated every 24 hours. Check the current top Wines by Winerank to see the rank in action.

We hope you enjoy this new social way of discovering wines.

A big thank you to everyone who reported our launch!
Here’s the list of posts (ordered by language).

• adegga.com launches – for wine people – and for us who wants to be (Web avant-garde)
• Adegga Launches (/message)
• Adegga to Launch Social Network For Wine Lovers (Mashable)
• Drinking is the new Travel (timtowle)
• Adegga launched (Pedromendes.com)
• What is Social Anyway? (Digital Demystified)
• Adegga Online (AlterEgo)
• Adegga launched! (ADRIFT)
• Portugueses lançam rede social para vinhos (João Pedro Pereira, Digital in Portuguese)
• Adegga, finalmente! (Mas certamente que sim! in Portuguese)
• Está aberta a Adegga (Logon in Portuguese)
• Adegga (Celso Martinho in Portuguese)
• Adegga (Simplice in Portuguese)
• Adegga, social per la scelta del vino (Viscido in Italian)
• Adegga: socialnetwork sul vino (Sorsetti in Italian)

Thank you all for the support!