Lone Yelp review dogs business owner
This raises several important issues.<p>The first is that most people don't review things. No matter how easy it is the vast majority of the population just won't do it. The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes.<p>This has several important implications.<p>- It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both in frequency and volume; and<p>- Again I'll say something I've said here repeatedly: the value of so-called "social search" is limited to nonexistent because most people in your circle won't review anything.<p>Secondly, businesses like Yelp risk going down the comScore route. 10 years ago comScore was <i>the</i> source for visitor numbers, which drove advertising revenue. If you paid you got accurate numbers. If you didn't, comScore "guessed", and for some reason those numbers always seemed low, so much so that lots complained.<p>The problem is that comScore (and now Yelp) have an economic incentive to get people to advertise such that they are not impartial and site therefore cannot be trusted.<p>It's why I think companies like Google (disclaimer: I work for Google) should stay out the content business. We're great at connecting people to things they want. If we're one of those things they want then we have at least the potential for the appearance (if not the actuality) of impropriety, at the very least.<p>I just don't see local reviews and social search going, well, anywhere, certainly anytime soon.