I read the other day an article in TIME Magazine – on the occasion of the iPad release –, where Jonathan Ive said that at Apple they were not looking for reproducing what every one does, but to take the most important things and to build them so it would be pleasant to use. This is not an article about Apple.

I like what Jonathan Ive said. It reminds me an advice I gave to LeMagIT (french web magazine for guys working in IT) when I was working for them : never put a rating system on articles. They didn’t listen to me.

I don’t know if it’s because I think like a developer, who counts using 0 and 1 (one day I told a friend that we had a 2-key keyboard to develop faster), but it’s really hard for me to decide if I like something a lot or just a little, or not at all.

Rating is hard. So sometimes I bypass this by splitting grades. For example, on Allociné (the french IMDB), they have a 4-star rating system. So I decided to sub categorized each star : realisation, scenario, soundtrack, and actors. Then, I just have to award each star either 1 or 0, depending on my satisfaction. It works pretty well.

Of course, it’s impossible to know who create this “rate everything” rule, spreading over the web. I’m pretty sure that Youtube did a lot – it’s the perfect web 2.0’s website. We can rate videos on 5-stars, which destroyed my Allociné rating method. As an article in the last Wired says: 87% of the stars are five-stars, 8% are zero-star. We  have almost nothing between those two. We can easily say that : most of the people rate only if they like the video and they never try to determine if they like it a lot or just a little.

Facebook knows it well, because they are clever (Youtube and eBay aren’t, because they don’t think enough) : either you like, or you just shut up. And YouTube finally got that: they removed their rating system, and put a like-system. Now, it’s your turn!