I was buying some music from Amazon.com today, which is quickly becoming my favorite place to buy music due to their "Daily Deals", which I'm notified of via Twitter (http://twitter.com/amazonmp3). Also, Amazon's customer reviews give me a lot of confidence about my purchases. In fact, if Amazon stocks a product I want to buy, even if I don't plan on buying it from Amazon, I will check their reviews. It's central to how I make decisions about spending my money. So I'm normally pretty sensitive to changes Amazon makes in this system. I don't know if this is new, or I somehow missed it for a while, but when I was purchasing today's Daily Deal I saw the following displayed:
It's a pretty simple change to the customer review system - basically it just takes the most useful favorable and critical reviews and pops them to the top of the review list. It's little enhancements like this that help filter social rating data that make it orders of magnitude more useful.
I read an article about two years ago that said something the effect of, within 5 years a vast majority of music purchases would be made based on in-network social recommendations. Amazon has always gotten it right ... I think we'll start to see more of this kind of honest review posting that will actually lead to more purchases. Also, buying from Amazon is the way to go -- DRM free has to be the future.