So far lack of categorization on WWHOW! appears to be the biggest complain from our users. That was a conscious decision on our part not to introduce categories as we wanted to simplify post structure as much as we possibly could. Instead we decided on automatic tag generation and allowing users to add / change tags on the post. We are not yet ready to step back and change the approach, we are rethinking it though.

There are a few interesting challenges about categorization, first is the list. How would you categorize deals that could appear on this site – the site has not built its community yet and has not found its niche. Will it work better of masters of conspicuous consumption, wine clubs, penny pinchers, small businesses, or anyone else? There is a world of categories to cover. Take for example a look at Yelp category list. It’s huge and still doesn’t cover all the possibilities.

Another challenge is of course data entry; picking category from a list is easy, but how about adding it to SMS post? Of course it remains to be seen whether posting through SMS (via Twitter) turns out to be a popular venue.

Tagging appears to be a better approach, and using Tag clouds naturally surfaces popular terms, etc. Well, there is a lot of problems with tags as well – using auto generation could be a very simple task with frankly rather disappointing results, or it could be a very complex task which would require serious machine learning / AI algorithms, and that is not something we are prepared to deal with at the moment.

So for now we’ll keep an eye on how the site shapes up and will make small steps improving end-user experience.

Of course if you have any ideas I would love to hear them, please put your comments or email me.naw