Yelp

Yelp bringing local reviews to your iPhone and the World

on June 5th, 2008 by Michael D Jensen

June has arrived, the much anticipated month for Apple to launch iPhone 2.0, where 3rd party developers can create apps and games for the iPhone. Yelp has told CNet News that they are developing an application for the iPhone that will make use of its My Location (GPS or GPS-like) capabilities to give restaurant (and local business) reviews for locations near where you physically are. Currently the iPhone has a “Maps” app that uses Google maps, but it doesn’t give any reviews or ratings information.

On a separate note, but still on local reviews, later this year Yelp will let users leave reviews for businesses outside the US, starting with Canada and other English-speaking countries. I’d love to hear not only where locals like to eat when I’m out of the country, but also where tourists enjoyed eating, so this will be a nice expansion for Yelp.

more

Yelp for Business Update: Badges and Highlighted Reviews

on April 29th, 2008 by Michael D Jensen

Yelp added some new tools for Local Businesses that really outdo what other Local Search sites are doing (via). It’s kind of like Google’s Webmaster Central, but for local businesses. Here’s some new functionality from Yelp:

1) Badges that can show number of reviews and/or the star rating from customers.

2) See how many visits your local business review page gets.

3) Add images, slideshows, and announcements to your local business review page.

4) Interact with customers who left reviews.

5) Highlight a “favorite review”, making it more prominent than other reviews.

This reminds me a little of Yahoo’s SearchMonkey platform where you can claim a search result and customize it a bit to reflect more of what you think your customers would like to see (or that will catch their attention).

Great job to Yelp for putting together a nice system for local businesses, now to get more local businesses on board!

I always like to think about “implications” with new features like this. My first thought is, hopefully Google Maps and Yahoo Local et al. will get on board and up the ante with new features. I like the direction Yelp is going in. The badge is a great way to get customers from a local business’ web site to the Yelp local business listing, encouraging more reviews (if you can get to their website). Seeing what kind of traffic you are getting alone is a fantastic feature. I like the highlighting a favorite review idea as well, although I wonder if its value to a customer goes up or down knowing it is the business’ doing of putting it at the top.

more