I’m not quite as jaded as Jose but, I agree to an extent. Ratings are subjective. I tend to avoid the touristy areas of most cities. I currently live in SF as well. Perusing the general referrals I found places I enjoy and places I avoid w/pretty much equal ratings.

The point of the article was the site owner(s) recognize the problem w/subjectivity and seem to be shifting their approach to helping like-minded individuals connect vs random ratings. This would greatly increase the reliability of referrals.

If the site fostered connections to other social networks they could greatly increase their appeal. My .02

it’d be cool to have a little (cb) link after each company name.

the popup snap stuff is still a loser. if it was blazing fast, it could work to some degree – in theory, but seeing as how it is slow as sh**, it’s a nonstarter. just annoying.

The sad truth is that most of the gay bars in San Francisco suck. If you want to go to boring, aseptic places with bad music where you can’t even smoke, well great, but it’s kind of pointless to collect scores on the Castro bars where the rating scale varies from “God this sucks” to “if I have to listen to this song again I’ll blow my brains out”. If you’re visiting from Topeka, KS maybe it’s an improvement, but if you’re from Europe, you’ll be astonished at how completely boring it is.

Basically this is a tourist magazine. Locals never use these sites or magazines, never did, and never will. They rely on friends to call them with a tip about a fun band or party, or some reason to go to a particular place. So as a source of local intelligence, sites like this are completely useless. A few bar rags survived, but mainly by cutting advertising deals with one of SF’s porno studios.

As for gay tourists, they primarily want to get laid. If they wanted to sit around paying $8 for Cosmos while watching the latest Beyonce video, they could do that at the lame ass gay bar in their home town. This is where these services fail. They always edit out “seedy” listings, instead focusing on bed and breakfast listings, gay restaurants (is the food gay?), etc.

Blow Buddies, which John Waters famously compared to Starbucks, is conspicuously absent from these sites. Having hosted many many out of town guests, I can say from experience it’s one of the first destinations they ask about.

If you’re visiting San Francisco, the best source of local information, apart from friends, is Betty and Pansy’s Severe Queer Review. It’s very entertaining and brutally honest (and generally accurate). It’s also one of those antiquated technologies otherwise known as a book.

Let’s just focus on the merits of the product. It’s a good product from a great, talented individual.

If we could offload just 10% of the gay men out there cruising on Craigslist alone onto a social networking site, we’d be larger than Facebook.

Your argument is a tired one. If you don’t understand why people with a certain commonality group together… I guess you don’t really understand about being social.

Everyone has their own thing. While being gay doesn’t define a person as to who they are, it’s still a part of their life. There are certain places that are very trendy and friendly towards gays and there are places where there are not (in terms of living and vacationing). I know I always wanted to go to Fiji. It’s my dream vacation. Unfortunately, I was not aware that Fiji considers homosexuality a crime punishable by death. How sad.

I’ve got to get back to being super gay and super isolating myself. You know, because every day is gay day. I’m also thinking about joining the army while I’m at it. Maybe I’ll get to travel some.

This reminds me of my mother telling me that, “Everyday is Kids Day” in response to my questioning Mother’s day and Father’s Day.