I was an early adopter of Yelp. I wrote a bunch of reviews, got some nice compliments, even made it to Elite status a couple of times. At some point Yelp became a resource hub for me to find new businesses. In a city where every other person you meet works in tech, Yelp had a large community creating all kinds of reviews. I used Yelp to discover new restaurants, local dentists, city parks, clothing boutiques, you name it. People were (and still are) bananas about writing reviews. Just look at Jessica, who's been an Elite member for 7 years with over 1400 reviews. Bananas. But over time the site just became too difficult to navigate, weighted down with irrelevant content and messy user experience. Friday night would roll around, I'd jump on Yelp to peruse the latest updates, best-of-lists and search pages, only to walk away with nowhere to go for dinner. The worst was when I traveled to other cities. I'd spend a ton of time researching restaurants, only to be disappointed with the food/atmosphere/venue once I got there. For all the content that Yelp had, they weren't able to recommend me anything that was relevant. You have my data. You have the data from these businesses. You have data from my social graph. And yet, somehow you're not able to bring all these things together?
So over time I just stopped using the site. In the last year though my usage of Yelp has really picked up. Solely because of the mobile app. With the phone real estate as small as it is, Yelp was forced to cull their feature set down to just the things that mattered. A touch interface also makes searching, browsing and viewing so much simpler. And they are finally tying the data points together. Want to look at the menu? Here's what 23+ reviewers thought about the gumbo. Too bad their web UI is still playing catch-up. But hey, who does anything on the desktop these days.
In the meantime, I need a place to go on Friday night in the South Bay. Any suggestions? :)
