Yelp allows businesses to "fight back"

Techcrunch are cover Yelp's new suite of features that allow businesses to join the conversation which happens around their business. I think this is a great feature and something BView has done since launch.

Allowing the business to join the discussion:

• businesses can respond to reviews
• reviewers and businesses can engage in a conversation around a review
• businesses and reviewers can subscribe to each other to track activity

It seemed like the fair thing to do in order to allow a balanced view where both parties can present their case and allow the reader to decide.

It's not a fight - it's a conversation.

Facebook instant messenger

I played with Facebook IM for the first time yesterday and I was pretty impressed with the front end display and the way it has been incorporated into the UI of the existing site. A few issues though:

- it told me people were online who clearly were not
- new messages took an age to "load" (or so I was being told) so not very instant

I might actually use it once it works. It got me wondering though how much this will antagonise corp IT departments who block IM clients already. Will it cause FB to be blocked by more businesses or can the functionality be separated from the rest of the site? Is it any different to playing scrabble? Will anyone care.

I also tried to pull in some Yelp news from my profile there. Oh dear - started getting someone else's activity (and yes I checked the email address).

EDIT: and FB is getting very, very, very low just now. I had to stop using it for a while as it just ground to a halt.

4 searches where Google is 2nd best

Google is a brilliant search engine and it’s now very infrequent I have to go outside the top 3 links when I am searching for a specific topic or product. There are notable exceptions:

Forum Search
I found BoardReader a few days ago and I have been very impressed by the results. Chat forum search is something I’ve been looking at for ages and wishing for a better way to search them.

Blog Search
OK, Google’s own blog search is useful (principally because the spam is minimised which Technorati is shocking for) but Technorati is still my first choice when searching for blogs due to tag & authority scores. Unfortunately I feel time may soon be up for Technorati.

Business Search
Yahoo and Google have local engines but Yelp have built a great platform. My business, BView, has taken business search in a different direction by i)going for results across the entire spectrum of businesses (not just the 40% that service consumers) and layering in proprietary & public access data.

Google has reviews but BView and Yelp actually allow personal relevance by layering in your personal social fabric while BView has also added the businesses themselves to the social graph.

People Search
A search on Linkedin & Facebook produce results for “normal” people and allow me to get a feel for their friend set. 192.com searches across the electoral register producing a match for me and my wife (indeed, I used this to research the owners of my house prior to buying it). I have seen some nice aggregators emerging and I expect some big things in this area.

I guess these are niche areas which Google may eventually get round to but it highlights some niche areas where I would ignore Google. The same applies to auctions/classifieds where Ebay can get killed in niche areas because of it’s structure and lack of flexibility.