Hey!Nielsen: What is the point?

Whilst I enjoyed Nielsen Netrating's talk yesterday, I am less impressed with their latest offering, Hey!Nielsen, which I was pointed in the direction of by the Data Mining blog. Basically it combines a social network with the opportunity to offer opinions on TV, films, music, web sites and people, with the promise of your opinions potentially influencing the media world as the media pays close attention to Nielsen's findings.

Whilst it is a nice enough site, and offers the opportunity for a widget of your opinions to be placed on your blog or web site, its a bit of a one trick pony, and that trick is not interesting enough to make me come back again and again. Whilst I enjoy the opportunity to knock Facebook and Google, if I really want I can do it just as easily in my blog. Personally I think Nielsen would have been better off developing methods of gathering the data people are already placing all over the web rather than trying to make a subset enter data in their own specific format.