Local Onliner

The next generation of Internet Yellow Pages will inevitably include user reviews and ratings of services, whether they scare away advertisers or not.

Some people have concluded that such reviews will be an interesting “extra.” My expectation is that they’ll be a core service from which all the other features sprout, including maps, urls, professional ratings, phone numbers, and Yellow Pages “copy points,” such as brands stocked, photos, hours, credit cards accepted and nearby businesses.

User reviews and ratings aren’t new. Of the major services, AOL has probably been collecting reviews the longest. Reviews from 1998 still show up on AOL’s undernourished “local experts” site. Yahoo! Local’s reviews, however, overtook AOL some time ago.

Since then, a lot of startups have entered the picture, hoping to carve out their own niches. These are generally more focused on the reviews, and less on other Yellow Pages features. Strategically, most probably have an end goal of selling to a major player at some point. Such local service-oriented sites include Insider Pages, Judy’s Book, CitySearch, Tribe, Cox’s Kudzu, BackFence and American Towns.

250,000 Reviews and Up

These startups aren’t insubstantial. Insider Pages, from IdeaLabs, has aggregated more than 250,000 reviews in towns across the U.S., and has begun to license its reviews to IYP and search providers such as Interchange’s Local.com. I like that. Licensing is a good way to increase usage and distribution – even if it cuts down on the site’s own personality. Down the road, licensing is also going to provide good cover for major Yellow Pages companies, none of which want to take the heat for directly collecting bad reviews, or good reviews of competing, non-advertisers.

Over the holidays, I informally tested all the services. For my efforts, I got a bunch of $5 Starbucks cards (although if I was in Atlanta, Kudzu might have given me a $10 gas card). These expensive promotions are temporarily being put to bed. But I bet they come back. Smaller sites have always needed to “bribe” reviewers to aggregate their critical mass, whether it is with cash, gift cards or donations to charity.

In my testing, I looked for certain characteristics, including comprehensiveness, thoughtful reviews, ease of use, ease of posting and sense of community. Some reviewers, in their zest to win coffee cards, unimaginatively reviewed things like Starbucks, McDonalds, Arco and The San Diego Airport. What all the sites actually want, of course, are ratings and reviews of high value services such as kitchen contractors, plumbers and electricians.

Judy’s Book and Kudzu

In the end, I liked Judy’s Book for its ease of use and high level of community, with Kudzu a close second. Kudzu does a great job in Atlanta, and has begun to provide brand information for many of its services – a real plus that makes it more of a full-featured Yellow Pages.

Judy’s Book, which just raised $8 million, is the most interesting site to me for a variety of reasons. By allowing users to comment on all their life interests, it builds a better sense of community and more thoughtfulness ….even though I don’t really care about all the non-local oriented “noise.” Shakira, anyone?

The site also provides a unique window into who is actually looking at which reviews, and counts them up. I’ve apparently got 319 looks at my 16 reviews; 119 of those looked at my mixed review of a local Honda dealer. It is definitely interesting, and brings a much heightened sense of community beyond Craig’s List.

I also like that its window isn’t cluttered up by non-related “user recommendations.” Insider Pages tries to do that, but doesn’t have the inventory to support it. Subsequently, searches on “bakeries” might bring up recommendations for law firms 80 miles away in Long Beach. That kind of ad doesn’t feel like “my” site, does it? In all fairness, this is a common problem in all personalization.

Easy to Post and Edit

Judy’s also makes it a breeze to make new posts. Its categories are well-sorted, and its database calls up business addresses better than others. When posting, nothing is more discouraging than having to go to your own phone book and finding names and addresses for the privilege of adding a new post. With Judy’s Book, it is also simple to edit entries. For instance, I inadvertently slammed the franchise operation of a garage door company in San Diego, when I really meant to get the one in Escondido. That is not an easy fix on many of the sites.

In some ways, Judy’s is overly-ambitious. For instance, it really pushes users to send their reviews to their blogs. I don’t have a personal blog, and this strategy doesn’t seem mass-market oriented to me. I also don’t like Judy’s “trust score,” an eBay-like feature that I think is a short-lived experiment. It starts its users out at a very low level, and lets them compete to get beyond 5. I’ve got 16 reviews, and am still a “2.” Maybe if I could figure out how to install my picture, I would make a “4”?

So in the end, I like Judy’s Book, although I am probably giving it extra points for its high level of innovation. But note this: All the sites borrow features from one another, so don’t expect my biases to hold up over time. With social networks, the software itself is the commodity. It is the brand (and reach) that ultimately has value. None of these are so unique that they couldn’t merge with another, or be folded into another site.