Company: Yelp is a website that allows users to write and share reviews of local businesses. It also has social networking features (adding friends, groups, etc.) to share reviews with a trust network. The idea is that people generally trust their freinds’ recommendations.
All of this user-generated content on local businesses, combined with the Yelp search engine, also provides great inventory for Yelp to sell local businesses contextual advertising.
The basics of Yelp: create an account, fill in your profile, add friends and write reviews. Yelp attempts to auto-fill the business information on a new review. The review consists of a 1-5 star rating and a free text area.
Searches bring up local businesses based on your zip code and include paid advertising above reviews.
Yelp is available only in San Francisco currently and plans to expand to other cities over time. They are also rumored to be closing on a Series A financing.
There are a number of other companies that are targeting local business reviews in an almost identical way. For instance, check out Judy’s Book, profiled previously and idealabs’ InsiderPages.
Yelp is available in more cities than just San Fran. There are plenty of listings for here in Boston.
I have tried out all three sites mentioned – Yelp, Judy’s Book, and InsiderPages – and Yelp is the best of the lot. The user interface and social networking capabilities of Yelp are extremely very well designed and implemented. The site has recently added a mapping capability that makes browsing for local establishments a breeze.
My initial interest in Yelp was to just look around, but I found some great restaurant reviews and decided to invite several friends to join within minutes of signing on to the site. I haven’t had a similar experience with either of the other sites
One cannot ignore Yahoo!’s recent big push (has always been active in this area, but) in the local search & review space.
The problem with Yelp, Judy’s Books and alike services are the lack of incentives for users to participate when it comes to submitting a review. I bet you would find a very high search to contribution ratio … what motivates people to contribute to wikipedia is very different than review of local listings … this may or may not be the best ‘by the people for the people’ type service. When you have a dedicated group of reviewers writing the review, then rest of us commenting on it by sharing our experience may be the way to go.
Even a bigger issue is the fact that these services are not wikis!! Why not? The emphasis should be put on letting users easily add new businesses, correct a description of a place, post comments and pictures, etc. Instead, Yelp has become another CitySearch, with fancier member profiles. We need more member profiles, like we need another hole in the head!!
Sorry guys, Yelp is not a Web 2.0 company and is not even innovative enough to be a notable Web 1.0 company.
One new twist on this idea is another SF site, NiftyGuy (www.niftyguy.com) where people review people (instead of thousands of restuarants, etc). Sort of like a P-pinions, you can find reviews on doctors, dentists, agents, hairstylists, etc and even dates!
kaveh, yelp *does* allow you to add new businesses, correct business info and post photos/comments. it may not be totally wiki-like, but the features are there.
Another great social network site with local reviews is http://www.revju.com . Here you could be a winer of an ipod too.
ya, its wonderful, u can find the biz, but y look 4 all these & contact them, when u can find all the info @ this site http://www.wuraweb.com/. its the local reviews(every1 luvs + prices) what more can u ask 4, already in my bookmarks. its a growing site, so u may want 2 give them time. but i guess they workin on that because they lettin advertisers list free.
One major flaw…it’s a walled garden.
it does not provide the necessary info (phone number, weblink) to the business. why? because they are trying to force the businesses to pay a fee to advertise with them. if the business does not know about yelp, they would have no link to their own site.
now with the handful of these local hubs popping up, what’s a local business to do? have advertising deals with all of them?
google local is free. once google add a public comment feature, yelp is dead.
what about the fact that yelp is providing people with the opportunity to disclose personal and private information about individuals for the world to see? i have a right to my personal information such as my name and my address, but a user of yelp has posted this information for all the world to see. while reviews are useful, the way that it is presented is essential in maintaining a universal respect.
Yelp has moderators to ensure the address of a company is correct. It also allow you to upload pictures of the business both in and out and to input the url of the business and they are now in a few major cities. They also organize Yelp events where Yelpers will dine at the same new establishment and then each yelper will write their own review of the place. It’s also a way for Yelpers to meet other members of the Yelp family. The only problem I have with Yelp is their talk boards. I think they should be on a totally seperate site and unrelated to their home site with the exception of a Yelp talk page relating to businesses and services only and as a means of providing tips to new businesses. Otherwise, I don’t think Yelp can be beat by anyone, even wikis. And I predict they are going to be the measure for related sites.
clock suffocate paying parentage detained?reversing belying – Tons of interesdting stuff!!!
Super!
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Rave About It is an Australian website that aims to provide an enjoyable way in which users can search, rate and discuss what they think of services in their local area and beyond. Check it out!
http://www.raveaboutit.com.au
Yelp is good. Judy’s book has become waaaaaaaaaaaay to commercialized. Didn’t even know Google’s local was functional. There is another great review website called Buzzerfly at http://www.buzzerfly.com. Like it cause it’s easy to navigate and no commercialization.
A really new cool social networking site for Indians/South Asians worldwide is GoYaar.com. It has a Yelp like local review section for all major cities in India and cities around the world with a lot of South Asians – it is integrated with GOogle Maps – but until google maps gets better in the India city address – it can’t really pinpoint the location. Has 100s of categories to review like Yelp…but the social network features are much more in-depth than Yelp…ajax enabled..yada yada
My business used Yelp and found it to be a poor representation of what is described as an organic social networking site. Poor customer service from the account representatives and little to no assistance once you have signed your contract. Highly recommend other means of spending you advertising dollars.
wow..wtf is up with this shit?
W0W0W