No one responded to this or seemed to take any notice of this the first time..so here's my second attempt..
Note: I was going to send this directly to the developers through the feedback form, however it was too long. This is partly why it's in letter form.
I'm very glad you have released version 3.0 of the Wot Site advisor. However, I think that you should start to create more than just a site advisor.
I understand that user reputations is a big part of wot, which is still easy to use in other ways, including ways related to security, and even a few that can be browser add-ons.
One way you could use the user reputations, is for a spamfilter. It could be a browser spamfilter for email clients such as gmail and yahoo mail, or it could be for email clients like outlook express, or thunderbird. (I'd reccomend a browser spamfilter)
Another way you could use user reputations is for virus scanner, pc optimizer, or firewall. Users could decide what is and isn't a virus, and decide what programs to block or not block. Any without enough reputation data could be the choice of the user. If you were talking about a pc optimizer, users could rate some things they reccomend doing to improve pc performance such as turning off search indexing, compressing files, etc. This could also be used in a similar way by making a program that works based on user reputations that can help you decide what to change and what not to change on your computer. For example, if you are about to change your mouse speed to a very high amount, it can alert you that you shouldn't do this. Or if you are unsure what applications you should have open, user reputations can help you decide.
If you were to encorporate some or all of these, you could also consider making a browser of your own including all of these. Wot, a spamfilter, and other components based on user reputations.
Wot is a great site advisor and Against Institution Inc. is a great company. In not that long however, the wot site advisor will be completely perfected. Extending the security features you offer will benefit the wot community, and continue to help Against Insitution Inc. be as good as it can be.
Re: Expanding wot
Sorry, I noticed your first post, but just didn't have time to answer it last night. We've certainly thought of other applications for the rating data, but unfortunately, we don't currently have the necessary resources to implement all of them. Of course, once we are happy with the browser add-on, we'll probably move on to the next idea.
And just a reminder for anyone who comes up with cool ideas for using the ratings, we have a really simple API you can use for testing them. If you need access to all the rating components or have other needs the API doesn't fulfill, please contact us and tell us what you have in mind.
PC optimizer idea needs... work.
The PC optimizer idea needs a lot of work. There are three primary problems:
I think your other ideas (firewall, processes, spamfilter) have merit, though. I'd like to see Against Intuition release a Thunderbird plugin, for example. (Maybe they're working on that!)
Re: PC Optimizer idea needs...work.
You're very right there could certainly be some issues in that, but still consider the following:
Knowing you can adjust your mouse speed in the control panel, you could still for example have a recommended speed that would be right for most computers.
For the "Trust Metrics" you could have reccomended, and not reccomended, and still have a red and green symbol for each. Depending on your mouse speed for example, it could have reccomended or not reccomended based on the current speed.
That's what I was thinking originally, but as I rethink it, you're very right, without a lot of tweaking, the PC optimizer might not work.