Wine Social Networks? Hardly.

Just for "fun," I went ahead and signed up for accounts at pretty much all the "major" wine 2.0 websites the last couple of weeks and have noted some strikingly absent features at all of them that just astounds me.

For starters, a social network of any value has to enable people to browse other people's profiles and befriend them/communicate with them easily.

Second, the members of a social network have to be able to have conversations about whatever niche their social network fills.

So here's my list of wine-centric "web 2.0" sites:

Cork'd
Features: Wine tasting notes entry, cellar tracking, searching wines and tasting notes.
(innovative element: wine library tv is great.)

Snooth
Features: "Personalized Wine Recommendations"

Bottlenotes
Features: Tasting notes, cellar tracking, recommendations & wine club sales.

Bottletalk
Features: Tasting notes, wine sales, cellar tracking, same old same old - EXCEPT you can kind of browse members. I was momentarily encouraged by the name "BottleTALK" thinking it might be a place you could actually discuss wines or regions, etc, but I would be wrong.

Not a single one of these sites have an easy way (or any way unless I was missing it) to easily carry on conversations in the space.

At any rate, highly discouraging.

Now, before I run off and set up a smokin' social network of our own (which honestly is not part of our core business) using KickApps fantastic white-label platform (I worked a bit with these guys over a year ago putting together social network demo's for television shows we were producing - great product and easy to launch an awesome service on), Larry Lee tells me "Hey, you can do that on WineZap."

Really?

Isn't WineZap for "Finding, Pricing & Comparing" wines? Yep.

And there's our (new) friend Michael Stajer, doing it right, again.

Right at the top of the page is a menu option that says "TALK" - and Talk you can! That link immediately puts you in a place to start a new conversation about wines. You can do videos, join and start your own subgroups, etc.

THIS is a wine social network, and a well-done one at that (right on Michael!). It just blows me away that the sites claiming to be the new "Wine 2.0" social networks are totally missing the boat, and WineZap's e-commerce site is hitting all the right notes.

Want to find, AND TALK about wines? Go to WineZap NOW and sign up!

Wine 2.0 Competition Update

Lots of thanks to all the folks who've supported what we're working on by checking out our video pitch over at Vator, Vino Veritas is now the highest rated pitch in the Wine 2.0 competition!

There's still a few weeks to go in the competition, so we'll see how the rest of the contest shakes out, but our closest rated competitor has been up a lot longer than we have and they have triple the views, but the same number of ratings. So on a vote-to-view ratio, we're kicking butt!

I want to take a minute to comment on some of the pitches over there and my favorites (besides our own, of course) because there are some great companies on there.

Crushpad's business is awesome and will only keep growing (their micro-competitor from ProVina's "Winepod", was recently capitalized by VantagePoint to the tune of $4m, as represented by WSGR - coincidentally, our legal counsel as well) - and with the booming custom-crush and small run vintage business, these micro-labels will be products that will dovetail very nicely with our premium cellaring services.

Just like a lot of the smaller run wineries, as these micro-labels start to get traction as great wines, there will be more and more wine enthusiasts who line up for these wines to pick them up at the moment they are released, and they're going to need to cellar those vintages so that they get the proper aging.

And hey, that's just what we'll be able to help out with!

I hope that maybe even some of our storage clients will make and release some of their small-run vintages exclusively to Vino Veritas members:)

The other great business that just popped up a few days ago with a pitch is WineCommune. Their auction site is an awesome place to find great wines and their growth the past few years has been phenomenal. Larry, our co-founder, has added substantially to his collection through their auctions (shhhh, don't tell his wife:).

They've also been around since 1999 and are a growth company as well.

These two companies are in very different places in the playing field of the current competition since the rest are all pretty much startups or not yet profitable.

There's also a number of social networks based around wines, which is cool, but personally I think social networks are over-hyped these days and there are only so many accounts and profiles we can all keep track of. I'd rather make sure our software has conduits for synching with other online databases, and then some FaceBook and MySpace widgets for showcasing wine collections, but unless our users tell us otherwise, I don't think we need to build yet-another-social-networking-application.

(Do any of you remember Friendster & Tribe? I think social networks are a bit transitory by nature...)

We're looking forward these last few weeks of the contest to see how it shapes up, so for those of you who haven't yet gone to view and vote, we'd love your support as well!

Innovation vs. Invention

Everyone we talk to invariably responds with something along the lines of "that's a great idea," and we feel they're right. We've also already been getting calls from folks in other states either obviously interested in trying to figure us out and "rip off" our idea, or inquire about whether we've considered building in their state.

However, a great post over on TechDirt today draws a wonderful distinction between ideas, and the implementation of said ideas.

On this front, I'm profoundly happy that we are *not* an IP heavy company that's going to market with a bunch of patents (that may or may not be rightfully granted) that we're going to have to spend tons of legal dollars defending or suing other people for. That's not innovation in my book, that's extortion, and not a business I want to be in.

We're a company whose success is 100% based on our ability to successfully execute our concepts to the level of quality and detail that we have already set forth as our standard. The first step to executing a great idea is communicating it in a way that all the people that the project requires "get it."

We're there, and we're not just the next "great idea."

"Wine" of the Times

OK, I know I've posted a little bit about the this concept of "Wine 2.0" floating around out there and how our services and facilities will tie into this rapidly changing market, but it's a GOOD day for us when a topic about wine shows up on the front page of Digg.com, getting voted up to front page within 2 hours of posting, and garnering 460 "diggs" in just under 6 hours.

Geeks rule the world, AND they like wine (not just the Linux sort either). Awesome!

(Great) Sign of the Times

Web 2.0 really is an amazing thing to watch as online applications, communities and services all finally start to fulfill the promises that we were so deflated by just 10 years ago when the web first came to be.

I clearly remember the days of such heady promise of all the things you "could do" - the possibilities were endless!

Right up until you sat down to start coding pages, and then the possibilities ended. The tech standards, the languages, more importantly the browsers, the bandwidth and the audiences, just weren't there yet.

And now, here we are at Web 2.0, with amazing things coming out everyday. Great applications, awesome interfaces and things we only dreamed of doing not long ago.

Now hot on the heels of "what REALLY CAN be done," Wine 2.0 emerges.

If there is any doubt in anyone's mind that the wine business is radically changing (for the better), these are great signs of the times all being tracked and watched by this rapidly growing industry community.

There are things happening that one never would have dreamed of just a couple of years ago. For instance, Vator.TV is holding Venture Capital competitions JUST FOR innovative wine industry companies (not just wineries, but any supporting services as well - we will have our full video pitch up for viewing on their competitive site within a few weeks from now).

There are a million-and-one social networking/wine enthusiast sites that offer free cellar management tools and niche networking that are being enabled by the coincidence of Web 2.0 technologies and the enormous growth in the wine business.

This is all really exciting for us - it validates the research and the market out there for the unique blend of services we'll be offering and the more research we do on other cellar management tools out there, the more we see how very different our interface and application really is.

Being able to check out all these communities only helps us further define what we do and do not want to be (we're not *all things* to all folks, for sure) and clarify what tools will be more useful than others by the adoption and use rates on existing apps.

The real defining point for Vino Veritas, however, is that our app isn't just an app - it's a means of delivering premium services tied to physical, climate controlled storage for our members.

It's going to be a great marriage of 2.0 tech, and 2.0 wine geeks... oh, and it's GREAT marketing that doesn't cost us a ton of money (relatively speaking).

Wine 2.0. Dig it! (in our case, literally!)