Local review sites like Yelp have irrevocably changed the way consumers find businesses in a particular area, and truly given power to the consumer in finding the best place to eat a meal, grab a drink, etc. And the potential of putting local reviews and listings on mobile devices is immense. Yelp’s existing iPhone app is less than a year old and it already accounts for 5% of Yelp’s overall traffic, which adds up to be around roughly 1 million monthly visitors.
In the next few days, Yelp will be launching a new version of its popular iPhone app which we’ve reviewed. The new app gives consumers even more ease in automatically reviewing businesses via their iPhone and enhances its exiting GPS capabilities. The updated version of the app now lets Yelpers write review directly from their iPhone through a Twitter-like “Quick Tips” feature that allows users to create 140 character tips. This was sorely lacking in the original version. The tips will be accessible on the iPhone app and the site itself (if popular) and will also be shown in a feed using GPS capabilities when users search businesses. Like before, the app leverages GPS in the iPhone to list reviews, tips, and photos written and taken around a users location. The app will also feature a Friend Feed feature that will pull in your friends activities. Users can also draft a full review of a restaurant, bar or business from their iPhone and then post it later to Yelp.com. Yelp is also upgrading the app to become more compatible in Canada and the UK.
Since its launch in 2004, Yelp caught on pretty quickly and has seen consistent growth. Yelp currently has over 5.5 million reviews in the site. Google Analytics says Yelp has had 20.5 million unique visits in the past 30 days. Comscore’s estimate for February was a little more conservative, at around 7 million unique visits for Yelp.com. But Yelp’s monthly unique visits more than doubled from the same month, last year. Along the way, Yelp has decimated most of its competitors. Insider Pages laid off 2/3 of their staff and sold quickly to CitySearch in February 2007, Intuit said “goodbye” to Zipingo in August 2007, and Judy’s Book closed their doors in October 2007. CitySearch remains as Yelp’s lone competitor in the local reviews space. To date, Yelp has raised 31 million in capital.
The combination of local reviews and mobile is so compelling because Yelp now allows consumers to post reviews as they are eating, drinking or visiting a business. Think about the review of a restaurant that had bad service. Likely, the consumer will be emotionally charged about the poor service. Before the iPhone app, the consumer would write the review after the restaurant visit, when he or she had cooled off a bit. Now, the angry consumer can enter a particularly distasteful, and emotionally charged review directly from the restaurant’s table. Additionally, the combination of using GPS to see reviews of businesses directly where you are in an area is fascinating. Yelp is making it incredibly easy for consumers to quickly access listings, reviews and ratings of businesses without having to input there location.
Of course, the transparency and potential negative backlash businesses can suffer from sites like Yelp or CitySearch, has ignited businesses to fight back. Businesses have started anti-Yelp websites and even sued Yelp users for negative or unfair reviews. Yelp lets businesses fight back with a suite of tools to take part in the conversations consumers are having about their businesses.
Yelp’s next move should be incorporating Facebook Connect with its site and iPhone app. Currently, you can add Yelp friends on the site and get personalized feeds of reviews from people who are your friends and random people who share your local restaurant or bar tastes. But it would be really cool to be able to see your Facebook friend’s reviews of local businesses, similar to MySpace Local, a partnership between MySpace and CitySearch to combine CitySearch business listings in the MySpace community.
Here’s a video detailing the new version of Yelp’s iPhone App:
And screenshots below:
adding the ability to leave reviews from the app is key. You can now express your anger or happiness as it occurs, not when you get back home in front of the computer. What they really need to do is partner with facebook, at least with facebook connect, as soon as possible. Social reviews plus mobile is a winning combination.
def. agree w both those points. shoving more yelp content into the fb social graph will be huge. and short form reviews are sexy – it’ll be fun to see if goodrec and catch up.
There are so many possibilities with this behavior that haven’t been explored yet. Yelp hasn’t even scratched the surface.
the name yelp makes me cringe when i see or speak it. probably because it means “to whine, bark or squeal, cry.” add yelp to the dismal domain network.
LocalDepot.com – around yourself
yelp = short for “yellow pages” no?
interesting MS. i tend to think it stands for wannabe yahoo+help = yelp. can we blame this name on the geniuses from the valley?
http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
why don’t you stop spamming the conversations here and actually do some marketing????
Who cares, Yelp sucks.
Is this the right time to get into mobile development, because it seems like everyone is doing it? So I don’t want to be left behind.
Quick tips is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. I’m not much of a lengthy review writer. Being able, however, to jam out a quick piece of feedback about an incredible entree or drink will be really really nice. That feature is going to take off.
I don’t know if I necessarily like the quick tip feature because it seems geared towards new users (which is fine) but I feel like in order for my opinion/review to be read then I’ll have to go back and write quick tips for all the places I’ve reviewed already (if that makes any sense).
I mean, I don’t care THAT much to actually do it… but I care enough to be concerned with this feature.
Because honestly, if I’m going to use this app (which I will), I’m probably going to read the quick tips more than the reviews because it WILL be more useful… however, it seems to alienate the actual Yelp reviews which DO have merit.
Since I try to gear my own reviews towards usefulness, I feel like they’re not going to be read anymore because of the quick tip feature. So… why should I even continue writing actual reviews??
Are these quick tips also going to show up on the actual Yelp site? It seems really disjointed if they don’t… but redundant if they do.
I rely on my favorites function (”fan”-ing) a lot and hope this becomes a feature to the Yelp app as well. Scrolling through all the reviews can be a pain, but having the favorites makes it easy if you trust certain reviewers’ opinions which makes Yelp all the more useful.
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I like the app more than the site (these days).
To Dealyzer – YES! It’s not too late to get in to Mobile development. You have to choose iPhone, Blackberry, Palm or Android. Not sure about future of Windows Mobile.
Great, now how about a Symbian S60 app, if they are focusing on mobile?
Symbian S60 apps are much more difficult to code. While they have an app “transfer” service (”Download! on my E61) it’s hardly the Apple App store. The contents are rather stale.
What Symbian needs to do is create an app’s store that is just a really nice python interpreter (with some “perty” GUI objects, a zip-like package format and pygame support). Don’t forget the transaction and app management stuff. Sign the apps to protect against malware. Bonus points for a matching IDE. They already have a functioning python interpreter to get them going. =)
Chance of happening: way beyond zero but I can dream. Sadly Symbian is like a deer in the iPhone’s headlights. Too bad considering it’s actually a decent (not perfect, some GUI and BT issues) OS. Runs great on my E61i (what a nice phone).
In reality it doesn’t have to be Symbian that starts an app store on that idea, anyone could. The app store could run some small, custom banner ads below the running app to pay for things. That won’t piss off too many people. =)
Your complaint is quite valid but not against Yelp but Symbian.
bcostoa: Symbian has a reputation for being difficult to code, but something like the app above could be put together very easily with the Widget runtime built into S60. As for app stores, you’re not up to date. Nokia announced an app store a couple of months back, which among other things takes the users location and social graph into consideration when suggesting apps. Early reports suggests it is at least as powerful as the Apple app store.
Great feature. Should be interesting to see the types of comments generated on the fly. I also understand they will be making improvements to their API is great as well.
Wow, I can now pretend to be important from my iPhone. Just think, before I was limited to being a loser at home. Thanks Yelp!
FINALLY.
Now THIS is what Yelp’s mobile strategy should have been the first time around. They hinted to me a few months back that changes were coming and thankfully it’s nearly here. Yelp is much more than a business directory and without mobile rating from the iPhone it would be nothing but another address book. I’m looking forward to the update!
are they on android; the iphone is so westcoast
I’m not sure I agree with your “irrevocably changed the way consumers find businesses in a particular area” premise. I use Yelp no differently than I used CitySearch, for example. The big difference being that Yelp turned the act of rating into a social schmoozefest for those who wanted to participate.
For those of us who don’t, Yelp still doesn’t change the status quo.
I would strongly encourage them to go with twitter instead of facebook. Many reviews easily fit in 140 characters.
http://macmaniapodcast.com
Yelp damages small locally owned businesses for money:
http://www.east...tent?oid=946025
Yes, we’ve heard. Except yelp isn’t squat outside of SF. If you are really offended by that practice, (you should be), and you wanted it to stop, you’d stop talking about it and quit harping about yelpers too.
Why? Imagine you are a mafia thug. Would you want to have to prove to everyone you shake down that you might actually throw them through a window? No, you want them to believe that you will before you ever walk through the door so that you rarely if ever have to actually do anything like that. That’s the same thing you are doing when you bring up yelp’s extortion practices.
What to do instead? Hit Yelp where it hurts–in their pocketbooks. Give businesses a real cost to their reputation for advertising there. It’s easy to do. Start protesting businesses that purchase advertising on Yelp. Set up websites for Yelp cheaters; they are the “sponsors” right there for you to see.
Who’s kidding who anyway? Those advertisers are buying good reviews and therefore deserve to be protested. Pick an advertiser that depends on foot traffic and stage a protest in front of their business. Enough people seem to have been hurt by yelp to get a following for this cause and the press will just eat that story up. So you won’t have to protest them all, just enough to make the others worry that they might be next.
Overall impact of this buying a Yelp ad will be like an admission that you suck at what you do.
The first sentence reads like a press release: “Local review sites like Yelp have irrevocably changed the way consumers find businesses in a particular area, and truly given power to the consumer in finding the best place to eat a meal, grab a drink, etc.”
I know scads of people who don’t put much stock in Yelp or yelp-esque sites. Having played around a bit with Yelp, tried a few places highly recommended on Yelp, I often enough didn’t see what people were raaaaaaaaaaving about, lost a lot of interest in it.
Not-implausible stories about shenanigans from Yelp salespeople haven’t exactly boosted my enthusiasm.
I’d rather have SF Weekly’s “Best of…” accessible on a page/pages designed for easy mobile reading/nav.
Yelp is a joke. It’s biz model is for their sales team to extort small business’s to pay $300 a month to “sponsor” their page. It’s ironic that Jeremy Stoppelman complains about anonymous sources in the examiner piece exposing these yelp shenanigans.
http://www.east...tent?oid=946025
But of course Jeremy, these anonymous businesses are making this all up and it’s so unfair that yelp was exposed. Cry me a river. Yes and btw, all these user review irregularities can be explained by your new algorithm and not by your unethical sales practices. Hey Jeremy – - news flash, but no one’s buying your self serving “explanations.”
Instead of your crock “holier than thou position” clean up your act or your venture capital buddies are going to can you with your next round of financing. Shaking down small businesses is not a viable business model in the long run… stick that into your algorithm.
Yelp is so helpful! I just saw a cool demo of it here: http://tinyurl.com/cw9mn7
Didn’t you have another article on Techcrunch about Judy’s Book that they are back? http://www.tech...-from-the-dead/
I recently followed their Twitter update and they have something cool on innovating ratings and reviews. http://blog.jud...verage-windows/
You should update your facts.
Yelp is so helpful, Nice posting