After about a month of testing the site, last week Friday we finally launched myKerem to the public. It was more successful then I imagined and we had almost 200 unique visitors on the first day. I am very excited to see the Israeli wine community grow and develop into something that is far more powerful then otherwise possible.

Now onto the features of the site.
Today we allow any registered user the ability to create a profile, start a personal blog, comment on other user's posts, and ask questions on the forum. I hope we see lots of users take advantage of the forum because we have Israeli winemakers available to answer these questions.

The most interesting development so far is the wine catalog and search features. We are still building many of the features, but today we have over 200 Israeli wines listed and many personal reviews on these wines. This week we will be giving registered users the ability to add wines not already in the catalog and the ability to modify current listings.  It will almost be like Wikipedia where the entire world helps create content. Needless to say I am very excited.

The next step that we will take is to add a complete list of references for each wine available. For instance if you are searching for Galil Yiron in our wine catalog, not only will you be able to find product information such as alcohol content & region, but you will also find a list of all external links that mention this wine. This should allow users to learn so much more about the wines that they are interested in. We will also store wine reviews indefinitely.

I've spent enough time talking about new features on myKerem. In my next post I will let you guys know what wines I have drunk recently and what I think about them.