Yelp Hires Goldman and Citigroup to Lead I.P.O.
dealbook.nytimes.com
dealbook.nytimes.com
For one thing, it's awful for discovery of new places. Want to find a high-rated restaurant near you that serves a specific dish? Well, have a good time wading through random crap entirely unrelated to that. My favorite recently was searching for ice cream and getting a hospital, because someone's review mentioned how the cafeteria didn't have any.
Beyond that, what's the point of contributing all this content to Yelp? The value of the site remains constant whether you review zero businesses or 100. Back to discovery, Yelp is working with an enormous corpus of data at this point. You're telling that we can't compare my review behavior against others who've reviewed the same spots and shake out a few recommendations? Users and businesses both would really benefit from this.
You could even make things more interesting for more accomplished users, handicapping individual restaurant scores based on past review behavior.
It's a great tool for vetting if a restaurant you've already discovered is actually any good. But when you look at all the unique opportunities it has to really redefine how people find and choose food and other businesses, it's hard not to shake your head and sigh.
I discovered Yelp when I moved to the Bay Area nearly two years ago. The product has only plateaued in that time, while my opinion of it has steadily eroded thanks to its flaky search boning me during mobile food quests. Don't even get me started about its obnoxious nagging in the mobile app to get you to use social features.
Is it really worthwhile for investors to buy part of a company with a mostly bi-coastal, American userbase whose product's best days seem to be behind it? Is it just a "Hey, invest in us, we're kinda Groupon-y because we make money from local businesses" kind of thing?
This Quora post lists a few reasons: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-incentives-to-write-review.... (Some reasons include using it as a food journal, narcissism, reward/punish for good/bad service, and getting invited to Yelp Elite parties.)
This winds up being why I find Yelp reviews to be useless; the poster is trying to tell me about themselves, rather than actually tell me something useful about the restaurant.
"Believe me, I know -- my grandma is a south east indian polar bear, and I know good vegan low-carb empanadas! Also, the service was terrible after I told the waitress she looked fat in that outfit. How rude. Did I mention the parking situation is just horrriiible? 1 star! I know it's always hard to park in the haight/midtown/wherever, but pleeease."
I think the idea is that as you use the site, if you find someone whose tastes seem to match yours and you can relate to the stories/backgrounds that they include on the site, then you can better trust their reviews for places you haven't been, similar to how you might trust a friend's recommendations over that of a random person; it also gives you a guide on how to filter their recommendations.
In this case, the personal information can be helpful to you in that you know you can place less emphasis on the review.
The result seems to be reviews that value the restaurant relative to the effect that visiting and reviewing the restaurant has on the writer's ego.
This seems to result in a dearth of objective reviews about the food (or service), and means that I largely can't identify with any of the restaurant reviewers on Yelp.
A big difference now is on mobile devices. A long review isn't useful on-the-go, where quick judgements are desired.
What's the point of writing a long comment on Hacker News? ;)
His post got me thinking about combining Four Square w/ Yelp. (Feel free to laugh.)
If Yelp cannot buy Four Square, at least there should be some kind of partnership. I think this will help them both.
Turn all the annoying things in a city/turn into a friendly, fun activity: directions, restaurant reviews, hard to find places with no signs, etc.
Let's say you just moved to a city and find it someone dumped their dead pet (eg boa constrictor) on the street. You type in, "Who do I call to get rid of it?", someone posts the answer, and you both get a reward for improving the city (and the world).
The idea is to turn life's annoying problems into a fun puzzle to solve with a group of people spread around the world.
I doubt Yelp, Foursquare, or I would have the imagination to refine it. But you do. "Every problem becomes an opportunity for fun."
But, it gets better! You also get to compete against Craigslist and AirBnB. Maybe it would be fun to compete against 4 major competitors who have TONS more resources than you. People would be expecting you to fail majorly. Now that sounds like fun.
I totally agree. As an API user, their version 2 API had been in beta mode for as long as I could remember. I guess in anticipation of this IPO, they finally removed the beta labels. The API is not very powerful either. ( Reference: http://www.yelp.com/developers/getting_started/api_overview )
As an aside, the thing that always puzzled me about their API TOS is that you are not allowed to cache the review data. It seems like that requirement was decided on many years ago before we all started using things like Varnish Cache. Why would a data supplier demand that you hit their API for every request, including duplicate ones within a short time frame? What a waste.