Comments on: Recommendations > Reviews. Yet no one is doing it in the local space.

By: Thusenth

Thusenth — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:19:36 +0000

Wow… that was nearly word for word our startup’s competitive advantage. Now that our model is exposed to thousands, I better kick up the development. At least we all see the need!

By: Ahmed

Ahmed — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:55:30 +0000

Hey Noah – I’ve been talking to Pema for a while (before you guys even went beta) – the difference here is that I am advocating a site that has full business listings, whereas yours the businesses must be entered via the user.

By: Noah Godfrey

Noah Godfrey — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:08:53 +0000

Cool thought, Ahmed. Totally agree … recommendations from people you know and trust trump random reviews any day.

We’ve tried to make GigPark pretty simple (and we try to make it even simpler every day) so I’d love to hear more about your concept. Wanna chat?

Noah Godfrey
Founder, GigPark
noah AT gigpark DOT com

By: Ahmed

Ahmed — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 04:28:19 +0000

I’m not so sure about that Andre – the reviews have 900 details which just make the entire experience even more cumbersome. If I knew the hotels my friends thought were the best … basically that is WOM right there.

By: Andre

Andre — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 05:47:04 +0000

reviews are still very useful in a lot of areas, maybe not business listings which get < 10 reviews, but resorts, hotels etc, are very important. Take tripadvisor for example, you plan a trip, spend lots of money, you want to read lots of reviews.

By: Ahmed

Ahmed — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 02:39:20 +0000

Pretty simple Dave – I’ll email ya.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:32:09 +0000

Just to clarify: you’re saying that if we developed a local site using recommendations instead of reviews, you’d give us a 50% discount when buying your data?

By: Tim Tracey

Tim Tracey — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:43:38 +0000

Ahmed,

I agree re: ratings. We don’t need an arbitrary rating. And we do need social information that search engines don’t provide.

This sounds like the “Connect-gine(TM)” (connection engine) concept that YouGottaCall.com is based on. It works on the exact same principle that word-of-mouth has succeeded with for eons.

Example: When I ask a friend to recommend his local contractor or professional I want to know who he trusts – not what rating he’d give.

YouGottaCall includes the opportunity to reward referrers and new customers with a voluntary payment. In turn, this payment may be donated to a not-for-profit organization, so everyone wins.

– - Tim

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:15:43 +0000

Perhaps as a refinement to ‘recommends’ (where you still explicitly vote), you base this implicitly on a users (anonymous) service data.

So to your analogy of LinkedIn connections. You instead allow folks to build a list of places where they’ve been, and where they’d consider returning; or for services, those they’ve used and who they’d consider using again.

Then whenever I look up a business, I might get systemwide aggregate statistic (how often included on anyone’s list – maybe up to a threshold like a paypal rating), but more importantly, how often included on my friends and/or their friends list. The first statistic could still be gamed, much harder to game the second.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:09:19 +0000

I think that’s a really good idea. I’d like to see an iPhone Application like that where I could recommend places, and see my friends recommendations then tie it in to Google Maps to show me where the place is.