4.07.2006

Yelp and Dodgeball

I'm having a lot of fun writing and reading reviews on Yelp, a well-done personal reviews site focused on metro areas. The target market of young, urban, dare-I-say professionals who go out a lot seems to line up pretty closely to what Dodgeball (now owned by Google) is going after, and certainly it would be nice to tie Dodgeball's messaging infrastructure in with Yelp's community and reviews.

You could pull up Yelp reviews via SMS, send messages out to yelp.com to set up impromptu meetups, etc.

The problem is that this is unlikely to happen, even in the "Web 2.0" world, unless Yelp gets bought by Google and integrated on their end.

There's just way too much redundant work going on when every site with a social dimension has its own "friends" system: both the development cost to the site, and the cost to the users who have to reestablish their social networks over and over again just to use cool new features like Dodgeball's messaging stuff.

Maybe Google should develop a basic "friends" API similar to their now ubiquitous Maps API? Orkut seems to have crashed and burned outside of South America; I certainly don't hear much about it. But there have got to be dozens of "Web 2.0" startups who would love to be able to say, "Log in with your gmail account and we'll show you all your friends that are already using our service, and let you invite the others."