Our first fortnight (nearly)...

It's been a busy two weeks since we launched. The initial response we've had has been fantastic. Thanks to all you "early adopters" for your ratings! and for everyone's positive feedback.

Here are some early results - The top 5 best-rated businesses are (at the time of writing):

1. Hayward Tod Associates
2. Strategies Group
3. Adnams plc
4. Google
5. BSkyB

As to the worst-performers, there are some more household names. The worst-rated business for customer service so far is RyanAir, followed by - in order - London Underground (the latest round of strikes proving very unpopular with commuters), Ushers Estate Agents, British Gas and Bulldog Broadband.

The Hot sectors (ie attracting the most ratings) seem to be ISPs (especially broadband providers), Banks, Supermarkets, Mobile phone companies, Restaurants and Estate Agents. There's also been a good mixture of positive and negative - the average plebble-rating across the whole site (in other words, taking an average of all ratings we've received to date) is actually quite positive - 1.10.

It's great that we're already getting some useful information but please do keep rating!! The more people rate, the more useful Plebble will be.

We also were tipped in a blog (Fishtank News) which is awesome. Check it out here.

Also in the news is our launch last Monday of a new service (already) called 'In the News'. The press release for it is here but basically it involves us each weekday highlighting and linking to any interesting consumer-related news stories that are in the media - a sort of news-aggregator for consumer-related stories...

Below each story, we put links to the Plebble Homepages of any businesses/organisations that are mentioned in the story so you can rate them and have your say on the issue that the story has highlighted.

Obviously the service is completely free and you can use whatever we say in any way you want. (If you want to use anything that anyone else has written, you’ll have to check with them first…)

We think that the In the News service will be a really good way of continuing to highlight consumer-related issues – that’s what Plebble does anyway – and, in particular, drawing attention to issues that have affected lots of people.

Please use the service and let us know how it works for you. We plan to add various features in the future to help you get even more out of it, including RSS feeds, etc so the news is delivered directly to you.

Also, if you’ve come across (or have written) any stories that you think should appear on In the News, please let us know by emailing us at news@plebble.com.

Thank you!

James