Strong opinions on tea are brewing at RateTea.net

I was surprised at the huge response to my post about Steepster, a Facebook-esque social network where people can connect to discuss their favorite teas. I'm even more surprised to find that there's more than one social tea site out there. The folks at RateTea.net recently invited me to take a look at their (sort of) competing offering. The two sites are actually quite different, though, so serious tea aficionados will want to check out both.

RateTea.net is more review-centric than Steepster. If I had to compare it to a major social site, I'd go with Yelp: anyone can sign up to rate and review, or you can stop by as a guest to take advantage of other people's exper-tea-se (sorry!). There are no fancy profile pages to fill out, just a place to write your review, and a scoring scale to grade teas on aroma, flavor and value. In the future, this will allow RateTea to recommend new teas for you based on the ones you've already rated. I'm more of a coffee guy myself, but it sounds like a good idea to me.

Tags: ratetea, ratings, reviews, SocialNetworking, steepster, tea, yelp