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Search By.... Email?
cjjjer writes "The Register has a article on Yelp, the newest local search engine based on your local friends and businesses. Robert X. Cringely over at I, Cringely has another take on this new type of service as well. Seems to me a service like this will only generate a lot of useless emails that will go un-answered. Wait a minute, that sounds a lot like spam."
but wasn't this an idea of IBM's in the early 2000's ?
I registered at Yelp to see what it is like. You can enter recommendations directly which is pretty cool. If you ask a question it has to go to your list of friends, which may annoy them for all I know. I do not see a way to look at the list of recommended businesses in my town. I apparently have to ask first. I think it would be neat to print out a list of all businesses in my town that have been recommended. It may be too inclusive a list but I bet it would chop off the bad ones at a minimum.
http://www.busyweather.com/
This seems to me to be one of those fad type things. It'll never last. The first time you get a Yelp request it may seem interesting or cool. Then after a few more, you'll be sick to death of them and never answer the things.
The great thing about google local is that it's all automated and immediate. This Yelp is going to be lagged which could be a real pain in the ass.
The other thing is, why would you need Yelp! to ask your friends to recommend a restaurant or tailor or whatever. If they are your friends, why not just ask them to their face?
This system brings up an interesting e-mail marketing situation.
When a site invites its user to "tell a friend" by sending a pre-scripted e-mail, the friend ends up getting an e-mail that looks a lot like a spam message, but it's not really a mass-distributed e-mail because it only goes to those whose e-mail addresses were turned in by other friends.
So, the sending friend might think they're doing their friend a favor, while the friend getting the message would be within their rights to declare that they were spammed...
I had a friend in high school whose middle name was X. That was it, a single letter name. I have heard of this in other cases as well.
http://www.busyweather.com/
More like:
...
Alice wants to know about "Total Newbie"
Bob wants to know about "Yelp is shit"
Charlie wants to know about "I have a question..."
Dave wants to know about "Problem here"
At least most Support Forums with people too stupid to google their answers themselves look like this.
Linux is not Windows
...is Slashdot just going to bite the bullet and make a Cringely icon?
I own a number of domains, and all the email addresses point to my inbox, after being run by the trained bayesian spam filter I wrote. I just tried Yelp, listing some of my aliases as friends, and the emails went straight into my spam directory. So I suppose most people with bayesian filters will never see a Yelp message (unless they have whitelists). I am happy I will never see one again.