Review Community Site RateItAll Gets A Revamp, Releases API

RateItAll, the consumer rating and review network that dubs itself the “distributed Yelp for everything”, is getting a make-over and a bunch of new social features today, including review feeds and product compatibility quizzes.

RateItAll, initially launched way back in 1999, shut down in 2001 after the dotcom bust, and subsequently relaunched in 2007. It allows users to rate topics that range anywhere from music to travel to food. The site currently boasts 350,000+ members, and both Quantcast and Compete show a nice growth pattern in traffic (the company self-reports 1.3 million visits last month, growth of 44% since June 2008 and a total number of 11.3 million unique visitors overall last year).

The new look and fresh features have been in the works for the past 5 months, and development started after the San Francisco-based company raised an initial round of funding of up to $1.4 million in September last year. You can now create a review stream which is very similar to Facebook’s news feed but for reviews by category / keyword or by personal network. The service also added a social compatibility layer dubbed ‘Quizzes’ which lets you compare your ratings and review with those from your friends or other members of the RateItAll community.

The most welcome additions to the service are the read/write API (the company also features RSS feeds and widgets for social networks and blogs) and the ‘global add’ feature that lets users put up any product, business, brand, person and/or place to the RateItAll database for discussion by its user base.

RateItAll pays reviewers 50% as part of a revenue-sharing program based on Google AdSense.