Diffen is an interesting take on marrying wikipedia style editing with product comparison/differences.
What’s Diffen?
Diffen is a user-generated (Wiki style) collection of differences and comparisons. For e.g. you can use Diffen to know the difference between a jail and a prison as well as compare iPod and Zune.
A typical comparison in Diffen will include:
- Objective comparison (i.e. short/factual info)
- Descriptive comparison (texty info with more details)
- Comments (what’s your opinion?)
The concept is very neat and if Diffen executes it well, I do see a strong adoption of such a comparator service. What can really work in Diffen’s benefit is that people don’t necessarily look for verbose comparison (i.e. mouthshut styled), but they really want is a quick feature-by-feature comparison and somewhat detailed.
As founder Nikhilesh Jasuja puts it:
Diffen is a user-generated (aka Wiki) collection of differences and comparisons. What is the difference between Shia and Sunni? Blu-ray and HD DVD? Jail and Prison? Communism and socialism? Zune and iPod? Living in Mumbai vs. living in Bangalore? Diffen is a place for such differences and comparisons.
We have customized MediaWiki – the software that Wikipedia runs on. Users have a WYSIWYG editor for editing the articles and they can also leave their comments on the comparisons. This allows people to express their opinions (while the article only has facts).
As far as improvements are concerned, Diffen team really needs to really work on involving the community. To start off, they need to really make the editing process a breeze (especially with objective comparison section).
Give Diffen a spin and please share your comments.
Hmmm… “encyclopedia of differences”.. this one strikes to me as a simple yet elegant solution to a very sought after problem (Also makes me wonder why I never thought of this idea before).
All in all, a cool website. This particular article captured my attention Apple Iphone Vs Blackberry http://www.diffen.com/difference/Apple_Iphone_vs_Blackberry_8800
Great job!
- It’s very well written and almost convinced me NOT to go for an iPod
Oh yes! The product has certain good ideas in place! I just hope they start involving the community
its funny and engaging . try searching difference between Man and Woman .
is it an indian startup ?
Yep. It’s an Indian startup.
btw – the “man/woman” diff is a good find
Sure, it is a good idea!
But what is the extent to which user-driven content can power portals(if i may call it so) like these.
“sunroof moonroof” or “oracle mysql” don’t give any results. On the other hand a search string like “difference ” would return numerous relevant results on Google, etc
What is the USP here or am I missing something? And, how is it different from say … ask yahoo, etc
Ooops … i wrote “difference string1 string2″ above!
@Sangfroid: I couldn’t agree with you more! There is only 1 wikipedia, the challenge with these portals is driving the user base to contribute (in a pure wikipedia style).
What I really would appreciate is somebody exploiting wikipedia and build cool services around that. What says?
Well Sangfroid let’s take Oracle vs. MySQL. Sure, you can Google it and get numerous relevant results. Then you have to sort through those results, read 10 different websites, and finally make your own notes about what really is the difference between them. Imagine how cool it would be to have a website where you know you are likely to get the answer. When Wikipedia was launched, you could have made the same argument – why build articles for stuff when you can just search the dynamic Internet?
The challenge, of course, is to drive users to the site and making it easy for them to contribute. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: more content => more users => more content. But in a way, this site is also an experiment to see if the Wiki model is repeatable. The problem with Wikipedia, as the wisecrack goes, is that it only works in practice. But as Ashish said, there is only 1 Wikipedia. I myself am curious if the Wikipedia model will work. I’ll give it time – Wikipedia wasn’t built in a day. But if it doesn’t work, I think I’ll move to the About.com model.
why do they are counting differences why not similarities are mentioned
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