Yelp Review

Written by Allen Stern - September 4, 2006

Overview from Yelp

Yelp offers the following overview on their web site (http://www.yelp.com):

Yelp is the ultimate city guide that taps into the community's voice and reveals honest and current insights on local businesses and services on everything from martinis to mechanics. Made of 100% user generated content. Just real people, writing real reviews, and that's the real deal. Yelp is a fun and engaging place for passionate and opinionated influencers to share the experiences they've had with local businesses and services.

First Impressions

The idea with Yelp is that you can write reviews for local services, merchants, etc.

Signup

Basic signup, they seem to push signing friends up and that is one of my comments below.

Service Usability

Yelp combines local city guides with reviews. The site is very similar to CitySearch but has a much more social feel. I "enjoyed" creating reviews along with reading the other reviews about local shops I frequent. There are certainly some interesting reviews, Walgreens? Who needs to review a Walgreens? The mobile feature is a nice addition that I will be using on trips. If you are out-and-about and need to find a nice bar or eatery, you can search Yelp remotely. There is also a basic messageboard for each town to share ideas and get help for the specific locale.

The profile pictures really bring Yelp to a more personal level, something which is missing on CitySearch. The most important piece to Yelp is that they have thousands of reviews. No one wants to go to a review site that makes you hunt for an hour just to find a review that you may not even care about.

Yelp'ers really spend a lot of time creating their profile page, and create quality reviews about anything. The compliments section allows you to do just that, compliment a Yelp'r on their review. This is a great social feature.

If you would like to add CN to your list of Yelp friends, view the CN Yelp page.

What would I like to see added to Yelp