GoodRec is a web-based system for posting and finding recommendations from your friends and the world at large. The recommendations pop up on a map either in the browser or on a phone – specifically, in this case, the iPhone.
You can take photos of the locations or items or simply add a recommendation on the fly. You can recommend and look up multiple types of things including restaurants, books, bars, and other things that your friends could recommend.
The recommendations are extremely quick to create and show up in real time. Many of the current recommendations are restaurants although some are for movies and other media as well as wine and bars and nightlife. It uses Google Maps to show recommended locations.
Sean Parker called the company part of the “Field of Dreams” delusion – the idea that if you build it, they will come. He recommended creating a Facebook system for improved distribution. GoodRec is very excited about their iPhone app.
Sadly, the site is a bit bare right now, as this screenshot of The Breakfast Club demonstrates.
GoodRec presented at TechCrunch50 during the Research and Recommendations session. You can view a video of its presentation
here.
Hmm. Anybody ask anything about gaming their system? I’m having trouble figuring out if it’s nextag, epinions, product-oriented twitterfilter (which would be a good pairing with the social verticals yesterday), or what?
We created Goodrec because people do make decisions all the time and aren’t happy with the review sites out there. The most important question to answer is if our approach and product help solve this challenge. I believe anyone who tries the website or the iPhone app will agree that it does. Play around with it, publish your recs to all your social networks and let us know you’re feedback.
I agree with Sean Parker on the creation of a facebook system part
Been using Goodrec for a few months now and I personally prefer reading reviews on Goodrec to Yelp. Yelp reviews tend read like Moby Dick…. with Goodrec its a quick scan to make the decision — like it!
I actually like Goodrec quite a lot. Honestly I dont have the time to waste reading long and flowy stories of people’s experiences at a restaurant on yelp. Especially when I dont know who those people are and dont care about their opinion beyond the rating and brief review. By forcing brevity on its users, goodrec actually makes them get to the gist of their recommendation, which makes them that much more useful. check it out.
So far, it seems to be focused on restaurants, movies, wine and stuff, i guess products might be added.
I dont get it, why another restaurant recommendation engine. The quality of reviews in an app are a reflection on the user publishing it.
How did goodrec figure that consumers are not happy with the existing recommendation engines? Yelp has 18M visitors monthly.
@kiran…
http://www.quan...st.com/yelp.com
18 million visitors? Quantcast (they’re “quantified” you know, pixel tracked & things) only shows 11 million…where’s the 18 million coming from? I’d trust a pixel tracking system over comScore any day…eg, a panel estimate simply has to be further afield than the actual visitor data.
That being said, former Yahoo’s have been having a great winning streak in the past few years, imho:
Rob with SideStep
Anthony with Dotspotter
Ann with Maya’s Mom
I think with Mihir’s background, goodrec is off to a good start. And this former Yahoo’s bootstrapped start up was in the New York Times last week…so maybe somebody should start a “yahoo alumni’s are taking over the web”.
Still, it’s a bold claim to make that “people aren’t happy with review sites…” as I love finding restaurants on Yelp, it’s easily the “killer feature” of the site. I tried goodrec via an invite from another Yahoo alum, but, sorry, didn’t go back after that initial trial. Now though I’ll take it for another spin, to see if the data is any richer. From experience with UGC, it’s getting that critical mass of content to make it scale & see the network effects that’s most difficult…any idea how goodrec is going to solve that problem?
How do you intend to make money from others making recommendations?
Nice Logo!
@Kiran: I think a simple scan of quality around Yelp would answer your question. Personally, i sit on the other side of the fence and often wonder how anyone is happy with the current stable of consumer rec engines. Chief among them being Yelp.
MP (5th Post down) hit the nail right on the head. Most people these days barely have time to spend with their families, or doing other things that they love–let alone sit down and read all the latest “witty” reviews of the local rib shacks. The majority of users flocking to sites such as Yelp are doing so with the hopes of quickly getting a recommendation versus the old days when trial by fire ruled the world. Personally i find this to be extremely ironic considering the avg result is laden with paragraph after paragraph of user experiences. However, the real challenge i find with these sites are not the amount of information you need to sift through, instead, it’s the personal relevancy of that information and how it applies to us as individuals.
When you look at how we as consumers typically get recommendations on a buying decisions, very rarely does it involve asking slew of random people what they think about a product or service. More often than not, we tend to turn to our individual social circles and seek out a trusted opinion from the people who not only share that common interest, but also those who best mimic our individual lifestyles, social stratification (ie. economic status) or level of experience expectation. To me, not knowing the individual on the other end of that review or, more importantly how we match up in society and/or expectation goals, remains the largest gap and disconnect we face as users of Yelp-like sites. ( I don’t know about you, but wouldn’t necessarily ask a Rabbi for his point of view and opinions on Catholicism much less a recommendation for a great church.)
The other challenge (especially in Yelps case) comes form the business owner/operators side. From what i have seen, read and heard, businesses absolutely loathe Yelp (which is one of the reason why they don’t have a thriving business model). And while i agree 100% with Yelps position to put the consumer/community in front, i am also sympathetic to the the company on the other end of those reviews. We have to remember that most businesses exist to fill a void /play a role in the lives of a specific target audience. The Simple reality is, their offerings aren’t aimed at everyone. (In fact in all my years of creative advertising/marketing, i don’t think i can ever recall a CEO or small business owner telling me their target audience was consumers of all ethnicities and genders between the ages of birth and death that earn incomes between $0 and Bill Gates–maybe Warren Buffet.) Therefore, pages and pages of negative reviews from consumers who aren’t truly the intended audience only creates confusion in the minds of others (who may be the audience) and erosion of the businesses brand. Not to mention, lack of trust in the quality of results produced by the application/ site.
So, the (long winded / thank god this isn’t twitter) point i am trying to make simply goes back to the old adage of: Garbage in = Garbage out. As such, I believe poorly matched consumer recommendations lead to bad experiences by the consumers who trusted those opinions. In turn i also believe that this then leads to large amounts of additional poorly expressed opinions, bad reviews etc. etc. All of which, at the end of the day, leaves us with an extremely large database filled by an out of control cycle of mismatched opinions. One that ultimately leaves the business owner/brand as the one to suffer the consequences.
Personally, i think more businesses and consumers ( many more than the 18m that are claimed to do so now) would embrace sites like Yelp if they knew that they could drill down through these opinions and quickly take away the information that best applies to their own life/lifestyles, needs/wants/levels of expectation— or from the business side–brand experience goals. That to me is the only way we as consumers can simplify our lives, while also making better decisions. As for businesses, i also believe it would be an incredibly powerful tool for them to measure performance with in their desired audience while at the same time, not concern themselves too much with the scathing opinions from consumers they really aren’t trying to reach with their products/services.
So…to summarize, i believe that it all boils down to individual relevancy. And quite frankly, you don’t need to do a lot of research to realize how something like this would blow away the current competition in the marketplace. But more importantly, provide users and business owners (current and potential) an incredibly high level of value and trust from the content provider. In my opinion, It’s the ultimate business/consumer win-win.
PS. Please accept my apologies for such a long winded response. As you can probably see, this is a segment that i am extremely passionate about. Also, as disclosure and a shameless plug, I have no ties to Goodrec. That said, i am in the process of launching a start-up called Urban Revurb that (I assume) like Goodrec, aims to provide consumers with (among many other things) quick, accurate and personally relevant results.
Hopefully that sheds some light on the above novel
I agree with Sean Parker on the creation of a facebook system part
Great feedback and critiques.
Apple just approved our second iPhone app, GoodFood, which should make it even easier to find and rec restaurants while on the go.
The new GoodFood app is all native, so it’s much faster than our initial offering. It’s also more tightly focused on restaurants, so it should be much easier to find and filter recs based on criteria such as price, cuisine, which friends rated it, etc.
And now that we’re out of beta, GoodFood is completely open, so you can download and use the app right away without signing up.
http://goodrec....oodfood/iphone/
We think it’s one of the best apps out there for finding recommendations, especially if you like flickable maps. Hope you continue to find it useful.
How do you intend to make money from others making recommendations?