Comparison service Versus (previously Versus IO, but now in possession of that crucial Versus.com domain name) has gone social. The service is notable for its simple presentation and for allowing users to compare things that aren’t necessarily like-for-like — a smartphone versus a point-and-shoot camera, for example — and now users can also add their own comparison criteria and opinions.
They can also vote criteria up or down. The “Vegas” enhancements, available now in public beta, should improve Versus’s data by better weighting the comparison criteria. For example, as founder Ramin Far (pictured) explained it to me, people may appreciate a phone’s high screen resolution more than they do its inclusion of NFC functionality.
Berlin-based Versus has around 3 million monthly users at this point, so one may expect some of them to abuse the new feature by adding or modding up silly criteria. Nonetheless, Far said the FindTheBest rival would refrain from moderating criteria except in extreme cases. “It makes Versus more lively,” he said.
The service, which scored $2.8 million in Series A funding earlier this year, doesn’t just stick to gadgets. Far noted that the likes of Quora and StackOverflow include many comparison-related questions, and claimed Versus will “grab a huge proportion” of those platforms in time.
Other new features in the revamped Versus include automatic detection, via the Google Translate API, of the inputted language — a lot of Versus’s users are in Spain and Latin America, and Far said this should fix the problem of them adding Spanish-language comments and criteria to English-language pages.
