Baduku will be opening up the website to the public for viewing on December 15th 2009. While creating new topic and giving opinions on topics will still be limited to registered users, we will be issuing a special invitation code open to 5000 users on a first come, first serve, basis.

Also in preparation for this limited public launch, we have implemented a number of new features including the following:

Commenting
Registered users can now add a comment to any topic, similar to blogs in style and function and is limited to 250 characters each. We know a part of you feels your votes are just a small discreet voice that affect the whole but sometimes you may want to say more, even fight to affect the public opinion, then this is the way for you to communicate your feelings to the public.

Date Ranging:
One of Baduku’s most unique and anticipated features is our date ranging feature which allows users to adjust the date range for a topic. This allows users to view only the opinions that were collected within a particular date range. This could be as inclusive as over the entire lifetime of a topic, or simply the last week. As a research tool users can also few public opinion for a topic as it was one year ago, as a comparison tool for how opinions have evolve over time.

Future Features to come:
Here are few of the features that we’ll be releasing on December 15th.

Image Chooser:
Rather than just uploading images from your local computer, we are implementing a feature that will pull images from Google and other relevant sites based on the topic title, and you’ll be able to select from these images to use as a topic image rather than using your own images.

Suggested Products:
Baduku will also add the suggested product feature which will allow you to view products related to the topic. Once you’ve reviewed the topic and have made a decision about purchasing a product, buying it will be just one click away. We’ll be using Amazon as our primary ecommerce provider and many may ask why we don’t consider other resources such as google shopping, etc. Well it’s our opinion that Amazon with its network of retailers and partners will pretty much fullfil the gamut of most product types. Also Amazon is a more dependable resource for shopping, with reliable shipping options and consistently competitive prices. While other review sites might be more open with purchasing options from limitless retailers and even individual sales such as on ebay, we think that we can’t always guarantee the legitimacy of some of the retailers, even if they seem to offer much better prices, the chances the getting relatively high enough that we’d rather not be responsible for causing you such an inconvenience.