Intuit’s Zipingo Joins Local Business Review Sites

What I don’t get is how all these sites can officially launch country-wide and still have a fake sample review on the front page. Not only would you want to make the API open, it seems to me you should thoroughly field and usability test it in a specific locale.

Some problems are fairly obvious to me: rating a restaurant, you can only have a price range of $1-$100, $100-$250… !? That can’t be terribly useful when making decisions.

These posts have been inspiring- I wonder if I have time to do something like this.

The yellow page industry has a value of over $100 billion. The RR Donnelly and Sprints will not allow their share to erode without a fight.

The Yellow Page industry is driven by sales people. These sales people know the local area, business and trends more than an web site operation who thinks if they build it, they will come. All the cute maps and fluff/bash reviews will mean little if there is no sales channel that can match what the current traditional yellow page industry is offering.

Unless these companies perfect their model in locations friendly to web site service, these companies can best hope to be bought out.

Not listed in your summary is my favorite local review site — Angie’s List http://www.angieslist.com (I’m not affiliated with them in any way.)

They’re establishing a very nice position as the Consumer Reports of local business review. Businesses can’t advertise, influence or comment on rankings, and consumers pay subscription fees to either rate businesses (via an extensive survey) or to view business ratings.

Rather than doing a nation-wide rollout, they’re organically rolling out to individual metro areas. Alltogether, it’s been impressive to watch their evolution. (Incidentally, if you’re wondering about their name, they predate Judy’s Book.)

Another aspect to this space is online groups. Yahoo has a huge resource in the information that’s exchanged between members of their local email lists. I’d love to see someone mine that.

just out of curiosity, how does one populate their yellow pages? are there databases for sale that have the existing businesses stored?

second note. how come zipingo doesn’t have maps? (or is it just because I searched in Miami that they don’t have maps?)

Brian,

Re: source of YP data, my understanding is that most yellow pages (online and off) start with licensed data from one of several data aggregators.

The largest of these are InfoUSA (http://www.infousa.com/yellow_pages.htm), Experian (http://www.experianbizinsight.com/license_data/yllwpgs.shtml) and Acxiom (http://www.acxiom.com/PrintVersion.aspx?ID=2886&DisplayID=18)

BTW, here’s a good article on clickz that lists the major IYP players and their datasources

http://www.clickz.com/experts/.....hp/3424401

These data sources are a bit off-topic from the ‘local, grassroots business review’ sites that kicked off this thread.

But I think it’s actually a great example of the benefit that can be provided by the right local business review application & userbase.

These data providers exist because it’s hard to centrally organize, vet & QA large amounts of data.

Distribute it, though, let the ‘wisdom of crowds’ work, and these large businesses may just find themselves a victim of the participatory web.

Local advertisers can be very fickle. They buy advertising (in yellow pages in particular) to make their phone ring or bring people in the door.

They will sometimes try new things - but only once if they don’t result in referencable sales. In some ways they are a tougher crowd than the Madison Ave. advertisers.

I like Angie’s list and use it (and pay to subscribe). The subscription results in what I find to be higher quality reviews since the people doing the reviews care enough about getting good services that they too subscribe. I suspect the broader-based free services will also provide some value (where would I be without TripAdvisor.com!) though I think the reviews can be gamed.

I agree with Michael that open free services would be much better than silos though it does give someone an aggregation opportunity!

often times the data sources are necessary, as it becomes a HUGE burden to have each user submit every business listed. thus the reason why a data source might work best if you get everything rolling, then users just review/rank everything thats there (in addition to suggesting new stuff).

You’re absolutely right, if you require that your resource be “comprehensive,” the utility threshold is so high that a starting point is necessary.

YelloWikis http://www.yellowikis.org/wiki/ is trying to wiki-ize the yellow pages w/o a starting dataset. It looks like it’s going to take them a long, long time before it’s ever useful, if they ever get there. It’s likely that the requirement they placed on themselves — comprehensive coverage rivaling the yellow pages — is much too large for the relatively few contributors to ever approach a point where the resource is useful.

But if you tweak the requirements based on a slightly different user need (i.e. “blue ocean” approach), I’m not so sure a comprehensive dataset is necessary.

For example, if you limit your scope to service providers (as Angie’s List has), all of a sudden the dataset is manageable and a relatively small number of contributors can create a resource that’s useful to thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.

How many plumbers in Washington D.C. need to have a great rating for the directory to be useful to me? Likely only five or six.

In that scenario, the very costly expense of a starting dataset probably isn’t necessary.

Patrick, good point, but all of these projects are aiming to take the local search away from yellow page books and yellowpages.com, etc.

Now that approach seems counterintuitive since you are competing with the likes of google search and yahoo search. What one needs to do is find a way to get in those search results at the same time providing an added value to the businesses listed (i.e. expanded listings, maps, and other tools). This same value added enhances the utility to the consumer as well.

I know for one that I won’t go and ADD a plumber I’ve only used once to a website, thats his/her job.

Back to the idea of an API though, just for curiosity’s sake, what would people want with an API for this type of site?

Spotted a typo — Zinpingo ?! No, Zipingo, right?

Has anyone looked at what the folks at Ning are doing? http://www.Ning.com

Essentially they have created a core of these social apps, I suppose a framework, and you can derive your own version and customize it for your locale, needs, etc.

Several independent developers have done some real nice mash-ups using their tools and framework.

So as several others here have stated, the ability to build these type of sites is/has become much easier. The challenge is getting them populated and building a user community.

>> As great as these services are,
>> they rely on
[snip]
>> getting users to come to them
>> to both write reviews
[snip]
>>

Users of Intuit’s Quicken only have to click on a blue star in the software to add their comments about a business to the Zipingo database.

I like it and the background and colors make it easy to readp

The rise of the rating sites goes on (see http://www.ratingparadise.com), enabling a shift in the power equation: from the power of marketing machineries to customer experience and word-of-mouth influence. Value for customers is generated and the better providers are awarded!