Give your opinion of the site you are viewing

Have you ever visited a website and thought it was so bad or good that you’d like to leave some comments for other users to learn from?

If so, you’ll probably find Netopi an exciting and interesting attempt at making the internet even more democratic. This simple Firefox and Internet Explorer extension basically allows you to write a review of a site you are visiting and submits it to the Netopi database where other views can read and assess what you’ve written. If you open the Netopi extension while visiting a page, it will automatically show you if there are any user reviews for it.

The first problem you’ll undoubtedly notice though is that there are simply very few sites that have been reviewed yet indicating the relative early development stage of this project. Most of the reviews that do exist are currently in English although the developers hope to organize Netopi to deal with reviews in other languages too. The one other drawback is that the plugin can slow down your browser as it recalls the reviews for the site you are visiting. You can however toggle it on or off very easily to prevent this.

Netopi is a nice idea and certainly has potential although you feel at this stage, the project requires many more users and a more sophisticated GUI before it’s going to be popular in any way.

Netopi is a way to add and read reviews of any website: An item in an online shop, a CNN article, a hosting company offer etc.

It doesn’t matter whether the possibility of leaving a review is or is not given by the owners of those websites. If you want, you can see reviews and add your own right now, without installing any software, on the Netopi homepage.