Mockups: How Apple can catch up to Yelp reviews and Google ratings overnight | Hacker News Reader

Mockups: How Apple can catch up to Yelp reviews and Google ratings overnight

jonsadka.com

97 pointsjonsadka56 comments

A few thoughts: 1. Five star rating systems by themselves contain such little information that they are basically pointless. If there's a critical mass of ratings, then they can be somewhat useful. Yelp is a 5 star system, but without the ability to skim a handful of reviews written by other users, it probably wouldn't be nearly as useful. 2. The system presented in this post might work ok for one's personal ecosystem, but as soon as I strayed into a new city where my contacts were 0 to a few, the utility of this service would rapidly decline. 3. For all their pitfalls, Yelp and Google reviews do a decent enough job at enabling discovery, especially when users take into account the amount of reviews for an establishment, the specific area they're searching in, and the specific search term they've entered. Sure, there are fake reviews, astroturfers, and gaming going on, but it's not too hard for a trained eye to filter these things out.

This system could always fall back to the more general populace review if there isn't enough data from your friends/acquaintances.

I agree a 5-star rating system tells you little. But it's at least some signal and combine that with also displaying how many people have contributed ratings (which would be trivial in these mockup examples) and you now have a pretty strong signal as to the quality of the place without ever touching the content of the reviews. This is a sample of one of course, but of the probably hundreds of restaurants I've been to with 4-star Yelp ratings that have over 20 reviews, I don't think I've been to even one where I wouldn't agree that yes - this deserves at least a 4-star rating.

I don't think Yelp reviews have any correlation with my own (except perhaps at the far low end). I'll go even further and say I enjoy new restaurants far less when I read reviews first. Everyone has a different deal breaker- healthiness, tastiness, wait time, location, noise, price, quantity, service, smoking, kids, cleanliness, etc. Projecting all of those attributes into a single axis is simplistic- too much is lost. The reviews are invariably a litany of every single time the restaurant fucked up with sprinkles of "pretty ok". I would prefer a better system (if not a different company).

And all I really want to know is if the food is good!

But a five star rating system that aggregates the opinions of my friends and colleagues (i.e. people whose tastes tend to be positively correlated with my own) is much more useful to me than a system that aggregates ratings from some general, random or self-selecting population.

If I travel to a city where I don't know anyone, it's true that I initially won't have any ratings (from this particular service), but as I prefer not to dine alone, it's only a matter of time before I make some friends or meet some people and I have ratings again.

My experience of Yelp ratings and reviews is similar to kansface's experience - little correlation with my own tastes except at the far low end. I also don't know many friends or colleagues who rate or review places on Yelp, but I think many of us would start rating places if we knew it would be helpful to our friends, immediately accessible to them, and trivial to do.

But a five star rating system that aggregates the opinions of my friends and colleagues (i.e. people whose tastes tend to be positively correlated with my own)

You don't befriend people who have different tastes or opinions than you? Most of my friends don't even like the same food as each other. Some use mac, some use Windows, some use Linux. How sure are you that those ratings would be more useful than those of the general population?

Also, didn't facebook try this out at one point? Facebook would seem to me to be a perfect platform for this type of service.

The main reason I have (at least some) confidence in my friends' ratings being more useful than those of the general population is that the system approximates what my friends and I currently tend to do, which is go to restaurants recommended to us by our friends.

We've got tastes and opinions in spades, but when it comes to picking a restaurant, we're really not that different - our different opinions are discussed over a dining experience we all want to try and/or enjoy.

If we didn't have a tendency to like the same dining experiences, we probably wouldn't be eating together in the first place. The 'smart/group average' example also seems to be a good way of avoiding or minimising that kind of clash if you don't already know the person.

Most of my friends don't even like the same food as each other.

I'm intrigued by this. I can't think of any particular foods that my friends would say they don't like or don't eat - except perhaps obviously unhealthy options with no redeeming features (eg most fast food). I suppose some people might have a very specific pet hate for something, but usually that results in that person not ordering that thing rather than the whole group going elsewhere.

Australia has quite a multicultural society with a rich variety of cuisines, so that may be part of the explanation. Upon reflection, I'm not confident that our approach would always be accepted by friends not from here.

Maybe this is all just an example of the hyperlocal being more useful to an individual than the general. If Facebook implemented it well, and didn't co-opt each of my ratings into some kind of advertised endorsement, perhaps it could work there too.

Initial reactions:

1. If Google did something like this, we'd be hearing from their competitors about privacy implications from products that read your messages.

2. Autocorrect (or SwiftKey for that matter) is already obnoxious enough, not that I would purposely go without. I can only imagine getting spurious ratings injected to my chats being MORE frustrating.

1. That's purely because of trust and reputation. Google is in the business of tracking people, Apple just wants to sell expensive hardware.

2. You might be right there, although I'm sure it'd be possible to disable it.

Overall, I'd love it if they added this. I'm surprised however that Apple hasn't attempted (or perhaps they have) to buy Yelp - seems like it would make a lot of sense for them, especially as Yelp is fairly heavily integrated into iOS anyway.

Yelp has over 2500 full time employees and $3 billion market capitalization. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=YELP+Profile

Sure, it would definitely be a large acquisition but I feel it would work quite well with their efforts to improve Maps. It seems that they might becoming less timid, under Cook, to spend large amounts on companies.

Huh, really didn't realize they had so many employees. What do most of them do? Surely that's not mostly engineering staff...

Extor… uh, I mean, Sales.

They have a TON of salespeople. Only several hundred engineers last time I heard.

I thought the latest news was that their R&D budget has absolutely exploded?

Apple isn't in the business of tracking people?

http://advertising.apple.com/

iAd is such a low priority for them you wouldn't believe. From what I've heard it doesn't have basic features that other advertising networks have and it prioritises privacy pretty heavily. In fact, I suspect that reducing the market share of advertising networks that are less privacy concerned in favour of one they control was likely a major reason they launched it. Even if not, it hardly compares to the likes of Google, etc.

http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/02/apple-struggling-ad-sales...

Google recently acquired emu, an app that does pretty much exactly this. Look for it to happen soon.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/06/google-buys-emu/

Google HAS done this. I'm one of Google+'s very few fanatics, and searches for local businesses and so on turn up recommendations from friends.

G+ is everything this guy dreams of. And it's already very well-executed. All that's needed is a critical mass of users, which Google is (wisely) wooing with photo enhancements and great privacy settings. It might take a generation of teenage turnover, but I just don't see how Google can lose this war.

Hangouts and Android seem to be gradually winning people over into Google social. My younger geek coworkers actually are using plus a bit.

Heh. like if there is any trust left on google.

they are even pre-fetching ads using android account sync nowadays.

Off-topic, but I found the example conversation a bit jarring. You know how in advertising photos people are incredibly excited to be eating salad, yet real life is nothing like that? The conversation in the screenshot sounds like made-up copy to me, yet it is ostensibly a real chat between the author and an acquaintance. So I am left to wonder: are actual people really that giddy about trivialities in real life? Are they on drugs all the times? Or am I just an old curmudgeon?

I didn't even read the conversation; my eye passed over it like a Lorem Ipsum sample.

I wouldn't say this is how I think most of my friends talk or anything, but it certainly doesn't read that differently from the way some people I know communicate.

Seemed normal to me really

Might be a cultural difference. Having been born in the East Block and spending nearly all my adult life in Western Europe I sometimes still can't help but wonder how some folks from the other side of the pond can keep up this level of verbal excitement about things

Yeah, I would have expected a bit more either humor or toning down of the positives (too saccharine).

From a semantic analysis, this leads the text to seem very astroturf-y.

The best example conversation would be some humor, pop/nerd-culture references and aligned principle statements thrown in, along with possibly some chaff (ie, references/names an onlooker can't expect to know).

From my experience, the proper capitalization is also atypical.

Edit: nevermind — that may be induced by iOS automatically switching to uppercase in the first character after a period and a space.

My understanding of Apple is that they're not the type of company that would add invasive prompts to their users' private interactions in order to improve their services. (And I'm not judging! I would probably participate if this was a thing. But it would definitely feel more like a Google move, and the long-time Apple users would no doubt be livid — unless it was very, very much opt-in.)

It's an interesting concept, but I think this would open the door for the argument, "We added POI recognition so why not add feature Y?" Messages is supposed to be about communicating via short, concise text-style messages — adding additional features on top of that will eventually convolute and weigh down the original intent.

@jreed91's suggestion of having them turn into links that then connect to your review app of choice seems like an appropriate and minimalist enhancement to the app (Yelp or otherwise - ideally a configurable option).

Wow. I love the concept, but this is not trivial.

What about spelling mistakes? What about location (if there are multiple versions of a restaurant -- which one is used? What if your friends have entered in information for multiple locations of a restaurant)? What about text that only SOUNDS like its a restaurant -- and yet I get ratings for it.

Also -- what if I only want to share this information with a few friends, not random strangers that happen to know my number? This sounds like a huge potential for unwanted information leak.

FYI: Yelp and Apple are already in a partnership. Yelp is already in Apple Map for instance[1].

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/19/yelp-ios-6/

The whole point of iMessage is secure messaging for the masses. Mining your text conversations in flight would pretty much kill all trust in the app.

Plus, why do something this complicated when you have a maps application on every Apple device. Replace Yelp integration with "iDine" and you're done.

I don't think Yelp's secret sauce are there ratings. Review text is critical to understanding why people rate things highly & generating recommendations (not to mentioning IDing spam)

I personally would not want that visual clutter added. Maybe a simple and non-obtrusive indicator that upon being tapped, navigates me to a page with additional details (stars,comments, etc).

I just don't want the "Vegas Strip" of info cluttering up my messages.

Honestly if iMessage could just auto-detect a POI and clicking that would take me to Yelp, it would be perfect. I don't need any more functionality in iMessage.

One of the major problems with Yelp and other services is that people review different things about every experience, yet each place only has a single rating.

People, not being professional reviews, don't approach reviews like one, and are prone to attach different meanings to the star rating. For example, restaurants: On Yelp, people will frequently give a one-star rating due to due waiters, loud guests, wrong food delivered by accident, slow door-to-door delivery, lack of accomodation for some primadonna request, imagined slights, etc. — "...but the food was great!". Such star ratings are nonsensical.

Zagat (when they existed in their original form) had the good sense to distinguish between different aspects of a business. I can accept rude or indifferent service or a poor atmosphere if the food is legendary, for example.

that is true of every user generated content.

youtube videos are mostly garbage. But if you take the time to look for the good ones, they are much better than what's on TV.

yelp reviews are mostly garbage. But if you take the time to look for well written ones and base your decision only on those, they are much better than a probably-also-paid-for-zagat review.

going further, news site with user generated content, like reddit, are usually garbage. But there it doesn't matter if you look enough, it will still be garbage, and cats :)

Does Apple have any way to detect a Point of Interest (POI)? This would seem to be their challenge today then designs like this could fall out. Am I missing something?

I doubt it. They provide the platform that many POI-centric apps (aka location-centric apps) depend upon to detect POIs. My educated guess is, they have the technology.

This gives the user the impression that their phone is reading their text messages, which feels invasive.

I wouldn't want my messages cluttered with this side mission. Currently iMessages do one thing and do it well; if Apple added this feature I would view it as the beginning of a distracting feature creep that was ruining iMessages.

Most of the time I seek to dine, it has nothing to do with messaging anyone. When I do, they have iMessages about 1/2 the time. I have no problem firing up the Yelp or Google Maps apps. They're dedicated to specific purposes and do what they do well.

Imessages are encrypted end to end according to apple. How do would you process the plain text without compromising privacy?

I came here to say the same thing. This can't be done unless all the post-processing is handled client side. Doing searches on your iMessage contents would expose the contents of your iMessages to a computer somewhere...

"While Facebook could implement a similar type of rating system, Facebook’s rating system of Likes is an absolute one that cannot differentiate between something that is liked and something that is liked a lot, this hindering the value proposition and usefulness especially in large groups."

Facebook already offers a star rating system for businesses/locations/Pages. They display your friends' ratings when you visit a page, post your new ratings in friends' News Feeds and occasionally display a widget enticing you to rate places you have visited.

It would seem not too out of the ordinary for facebook to in some way display links to or ratings for businesses you discuss in Messages. I'd be surprised if they hadn't experimented with that.

This doesn't solve any trust problems, there is still no guarantee that the ratings can't be covertly skewed. I don't need even more things messing with my text app and don't want anyone parsing my texts looking for restaurant names. My friends opinions of restaurants are not generally useful. I can't see if they have happy hour, wifi, or take credit cards with just 5 stars. Many restaurants have the same name. Restaurants are location dependent.

Ironically this would be most useful if it clicking on the rating took you to the yelp page so you could see the details, photos, menu, read reviews, and confirm that it is the actual restaurant you're talking about.

Jon, fill your profile. First thing, you must file a provisional on this immediately. It's brilliant. Really, awesome effort.

A provisional costs you almost nothing, and the future gain is totally in your hands. In 5 years you can sell it to Apple for $5m. Seriously, it's a no brainer if you have just come up with this, and if it turns out it's unique? In that case you will be all set, but you need 5 years and $50k within 12 months.

So, crowd source this patent or fucking what? Seriously, take my money.

I like the idea, but my first thought was that Apple's iMessage social graph may not be interconnected enough to work. I think that a rating service needs some level of critical mass to succeed. Many restaurants on Yelp only have dozens of reviews globally; if we are going to restrict the pool of raters to first-hop contacts, I wonder if the average user will have enough contacts to get a significant sample size.

The context-aware link inserting has been done by Emu (and Yelp integration too). They were acquired by Google last year, and since have added the [Share Location] action to Hangouts…

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/02/emu-a-smarter-messaging-app...

I like it. i rarely read yelp reviews. i prefer the aggregate score(stars). i would prefer apple made their own system which accounted for 'device+number+ itunes id per vote' so i know there is some mitigation against fraud reviews and stars because it will map to a person.

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qNHWy3z...

Why is this focused at Apple and not at smartphone operating systems in general? I am not sure what integration Windows phone has, but Google Hangouts could at least go across it's messenger system and SMS - might be more widely spread.

I can see how this would help Apple and various data brokers, but I can't see how this would directly and immediately enhance the iMessage experience for the end user. I would be extremely surprised if this became an added feature.

Can we make this simpler than 5 stars?

1. It's great! 2. It's OK. 3. It's terrible.

For places, that's more than enough.

Why restrict this to ratings/ POI? Why not books, music, apps and people?

Echo, Echo, Echo, chamber.

No, rather not.

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