161–166 of 166 posts
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Unless, of course, Yelp or whoever else used the service also ran a man-in-the-middle and captured the information being passed back and forth.
SSN would not need to be involved at any point during a question based verification process.
It would be interesting to see a crowd-sourced recommendation site based only on positive recommendations. Something like a Net Promoter score to tell me where is good. i.e. you can only leave feedback for a place if you would actually recommend it to someone. Every business can have bad days, and a negative review can put a prospective customer off even if actually 99% of the time that's a good business. This isn't…
I work for a startup in Sunnyvale that is trying to do something like that. Would you mind looking at (the web site listed in my profile) and describing what is still missing? edit: removed link
FWIW I watched the video (all the women have moustaches!) but am no more informed as to how it works. I also looked at the business sign up page but couldn't find any thing there to help work out the mechanics of the process. It looks like you integrate with FB closely?
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It'd be great if we had multiple review sites. Problem is nobody has managed to get as many users to write as detailed of reviews as Yelp has.
That made me think of an interesting idea. No problem is not solvable with some level of indirection! A review aggregator website where the value of reviews from various sources is weighted by how reliable they are. For example, if there is Yelp, Facebook and Google, it can weight a restaurant 0.7 Yelp, 0.2 Facebook and 0.1 Google.
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"Worth mentioning is Yelp's long (alleged) history of using review filtering as a de facto racket to 'encourage' businesses to sign up for their paid services." EXTREMELY worth mentioning. If you've yelped Yelp, so to speak, you know to take their recommendations with a grain of salt and then some. Caveat emptor. While I'm on the topic, the idea of a single company managing reputation for any given space is silly bey…
It'd be great if we had multiple review sites. Problem is nobody has managed to get as many users to write as detailed of reviews as Yelp has.
we do. if you use Google as well as Yelp, every other site on the Internet which mentions the business you are curious about effectively acts as a separate review site.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work for a startup in Sunnyvale that is trying to do something like that. Would you mind looking at (the web site listed in my profile) and describing what is still missing? edit: removed link
Why not link it, http://spotlikes.com/ ? FWIW I watched the video (all the women have moustaches!) but am no more informed as to how it works. I also looked at the business sign up page but couldn't find any thing there to help work out the mechanics of the process. It looks like you integrate with FB closely?
I was unsure of the etiquette here at HN about pimping one's own site in the body of a post. I saw that others chose to put their site URLs in their profiles, but very few were posting them in comment text.
As 'iamgilesbowkett mentions above, maybe it would be more informative to search over an aggregation of different opinions rather than hash mountains of conflicting reviews into a single byte digest.
For the consumer, our site offers a way to casually discover nearby businesses based on how well they are liked by specific circles of people. All activity is contextualized by location; the target of attention is geo-tagged by lat-long, not the user.
We try to reduce the effort required to browse through large amounts of business listing and business review data. The user should be able to quickly explore a specific area for businesses that match a search term, or are physically close to another (perhaps unrelated) business.
Please feel free to surf around using the business search.
On the site, business search itself is open to the world, but the core social parts require an account to participate. You can enter an object term plus a location. Search URLs can look like this: http://spotlikes.com/discover/places/noisebridge/san-francis...
Due to the founders' interest in Napa and Sonoma counties, we have lots of comments describing San Francisco North Bay Area small businesses. One entry point for browsing might be someplace like: http://spotlikes.com/business/benziger-family-winery-glen-el...
During after-release QA, sometimes I try to do a kind of major metropolitan area hopscotch, visiting all the largest US cities using the fewest clicks.
For the SMB owner, our site offers businesses a place to make a simple listing - a page where they can post their basic details (phone number, URL, logo, etc) - and then sit back and watch the users stream that small referral link out in their activities.
Yes, the site is tightly integrated with Facebook. User comments on business listings can flow automatically into social media sites. If you authorize it, your "likes" will flow onto your FB wall/timeline. We have similar Twitter and Foursquare integration.
We have probably overlooked all kinds of stuff. We move pretty fast. If you would like to call out anything in particular, I am keenly interested in the feedback.