Seth Godin writes about how you can use your “fan club” and the Internet to help get the word out. He talks about how companies can get loyal customers to save product webpages on Delicious, show product shots on Flickr, and create product lens (info pages) on Squidoo. Obviously, he is trumpeting his service as a way for businesses to enable the new word-of-mouth.

Click and get his new e-book here: Flipping the Funnel. Its free and a good read. Pass it around.

On our end, we’d like to point out that you can do the same with Rrove. Restaurant owners and the like: get your customers to mark your addresses on Rrove. Make them public so people who use Rrove can find out about them. Ask your customers to provide an in-depth review on your services to give everyone an good idea of what you have to offer. Rrove, in our humble opinion, is an excellent way of flipping the funnel.

Atomu just sent me an email on some changes he made over the weekend. He’s made User Pages available! Now, everyone has a personal url that can be seen by anyone, whether logged in or not. This opens some new features and options such as:

1) Seeing just the locations of a specific Rrove user. You can see the user who’s just added a location on the ‘Everyone’ page. Click on his name, and you can see all of his locations through his User Page.

2) The User Page also has an option of adding that user to your community list. Thus, if you like the user’s locations, you can opt to subscribe to his list and get recommendations.

3) You can send your friends your URL for them to see the recent places you’ve visited. (Soon we will have RSS feeds for each user)

More than that, Rrove visitors can also view the Detail Pages of our locations (also without the need to log in). If you have a location that you want to share, simply email them the link for them to a) see the comments of our users, and b) to easily get driving directions to those spots.

More improvements coming. Stay tuned!

We’ve always believed in rapid development - get a working service out into the world as fast as we can, and let people play with it. Doing so allows us to get feedback and prioritize the new features to build and the bugs to squash. There is nothing like the user telling us what to do and not to do.

Sure, the service might not be perfect. The trick here is to get the next version out as soon as you can. Got a new feature? Deploy today. Fixing a bug tomorrow? Deploy again tomorrow. We’d rather do this, than get a fully-functional service out when its ready. The problems to this product dev method are obvious. More than that, we think its a bit arrogant to second guess your users….

This week I managed to talk to some folks in the space and get their take on Rrove. Last Friday, I caught with Stowe Boyd of A Working Model and the Web 2.0 Workgroup. Drove to SF to meet at 7am (no traffic!), and had a good 1.5 hours of discussion.

He gave me some very good ideas that will keep us busy. Among the ideas are RSS feeds for bloggers (obviously his number #1 request) plus the ability to group locations into sets (I’m already coming up with how our users can have fun with this feature). You can catch his coverage here. Thanks Stowe! We’ll get to it, and let you know once we have them.

Feedback is always welcome, and you know where to email us (feedback@rrove.com). If you’re in the SF Bay Area and would like to meet, let me know. Maybe we can arrange something.

David

Just found this off CNET.com (and its out on the blogosphere) - Yahoo! is rumored to have just bought Digg. Wow, that’s the fourth social media start-up acquired in less than a year. For everyone who’s not familiar with the space - Yahoo! started with Flickr, then gobbled Delicious and YouTube.

Our thoughts? Well, we like it. It confirms this space - social bookmarks allows search to do better search through the Wisdom of Crowds. Hopefully, people will realize the benefits of Rrove.

We’re trying to get the word out - maybe you can help? If you like what we’re doing, please spend a few minutes to “digg” Rrove. Simply follow this link:

Rrove.com - Social Bookmarks for Locations

For those unfamiliar with Digg, Digg is a news service entirely run by its readers. The stories on its front page (read by 100,000 of visitors) were voted by its community to be the most interesting.