A closer look at ALikeList
The buzz around the local business review market seems to be friggin out of control these days. I half expect to walk into my local grocery store tomorrow and pick up a copy of the Star with a grainy photo of a Yelper making out with Angelina Jolie on the cover!
It’s not that I don’t think local review content is important, really, it is. It’s just that this type of stuff has to have been some of the earliest content on the Internet, I am sure some of the early messages across ARPANETwere something like “took Molly to Surf Shack on Wilshire after switch testing last night, fish tacos were keen”. It just seems like sometimes it just takes FOREVER to not make much progress in Internet land.
You have to give Yelp a lot of the credit for the current surge of interest, not only is it a pretty valuable service, but the Google + Yelp deal that never happened, and now the Yelp business practices lawsuits have kept them on the front cover of the business section for a while now.
So if you wanted to reinvent this baby one more time, what might you do? Well let’s check under the hood of Alikelist.
First of all, while it’s a horrible name, it does pretty much sum up what its all about, it’s a list of places you like… so in that sense right off the bat its not a traditional review site at all where the general public pretends to be the next A.A. Gill, giving their two cents on every joint in town. So that’s it, stuff you like in a list… if you want to talk about stuff you don’t like, well go to a different site, not here.
Beside the fact that its all positive stuff, another important differentiator is that it’s also not about the anonymous general computing public. It’s not just about WHAT comments are being made about the local businesses, but more importantly WHO is behind those comments. This has always been the shortcoming of existing review sites… you have no idea who is doing the talking, and whether they’re someone you should be listening to. There are a multitude of features in ALikeList which allows folks to tie back into their social networks to ask for and receive recommendations on local businesses which make this a key component.
Alikelist is a site to discover the places that your friends, family and colleagues like, and to read a little bit more on why they like the places they like. It simply tries to digitize that conversation that must happen a million times a day offline “Hey Bob, I am looking for a good xxx, do you have any suggestions?”… followed closely by “oh yeah, lemme think… well try xxx, they were awesome.”
The idea and site execution is great because of it’s pure simplicity. People offer up their opinions on businesses online all over the place, but in many ways it’s all become a big convoluted mess, there is not one central place to go look, and there are often hundreds of long reviews written by folks like bigjoe23 to sort through in order to formulate an opinion. Alikelist thinks that a simple thumbs-up and blurb from a more trusted source will nicely supplement, if not trump, hundreds of longer reviews from the bigjoe23’s of the world.
Like with Foursquare and their check-ins, the business opportunity seems to be largely around allowing those local businesses to better connect with their best patrons in the local community, the ones who not only visit their establishments, but who are walking advertisements for their businesses via their check ins and Ilikelist status broadcast out to their social networks.
Comments
-
Sponsored Links
