How To Drastically Improve Yelp and Other Recommendation Sites

I wrote about recommendations/reviews this morning, in the context of major changes that would be made to social network services from 2010 to 2015.

"Many may not realize it, but Facebook's Beacon 'service', in which purchases you made were displayed to your friends, was a poorly thought out, horribly misguided attempt... at something we all want (even if we don't admit it): our friends' opinions. But in addition to the privacy-infringing implications of Facebook's premature program, they failed to realize that a purchase does not equal praise. Sometimes we buy things because we have to, or for other people. Sometimes we buy things everyone else is buying and spend months thinking 'what a waste of money that was'."

[...]

"Benefits of Social Network Reviews

[...]Your friends get reliable data on recommendations for and against from a context that's meaningful to them. If enough of their network has reviewed a product/service, they might even have the option of segregating those reviews into more narrow contexts (coworkers at business A, friends from school G, contacts in area L).

You can establish yourself as an authority. Drink a lot of wine? The SNS should offer you the option of displaying your wine reviews prominently on your profile. An SNS tracking review trends across networks can recognize: "These two people have the most dissimilar views on wine that are still agreed with by the most people in region Q. Let's display their reviews as a kind of point/counter-point to everyone in that region". [...]"

If you're interested, the whole post is available at: http://socialstrategist.com/2008/01/27/social-networking-ser...

I like the concept of a trust network where you select degrees of trust separation. I think there are some recommendation sites who do this already (except they call it groups). NewsVine perhaps? Interesting concept nonetheless...