My first introduction to Yelp was in person, meeting a much too shiny recent hire of the company tasked to build up the Boston area Yelp community. I understood it to be some sort of social networking site and she to be a superconnector, a party person and a party organizer, and a somewhat pushy person who was going to try get whatever she could get whenever she could get it. From me she got a free rental of the MIT Museum and held a party with an intensity well outside our comfort zone. It was the first year of a Student Life grant that gave me a good deal of latitude for setting up evening events. Having a whole network of online reviewers come into the museum for a party seemed like a good idea. Nothing broke or was damaged, their bouncers kept the numbers to the limits I set to them, and a good, if drunken, time was had by all. And as hoped for, we got a burst of positive reviews on Yelp and the attention bumped us up in the listings when potential visitors searched for "museum in Boston" on the site.
Over the past few years since then I've used Yelp more and more, though not quite yet to the point of writing reviews. Yelp is a classic Web 2.0 company, in which a community of thousands of unvetted unpaid contributors write their opinions of local businesses and attractions, like restaurants, museums, dry cleaners, parks, etc. Mostly restaurants. They rate the business, and these ratings, plus selected keywords form the reviews, which are autogenerated into a metareview by which all the say, donut shops, in a given area can be rated and easily ranked. Yelpers, as contributing members of the community are called, chat on message boards and comment on one anotherr's reviews through quick check boxes "Is this review interesting/useful/funny?" Yelp encourages Yelpers to stay involved, rewarding frequent contributors, and some people write hundreds of reviews, with gold stars, invitations to special events, and other status symbols. Following the typical Web 2.0 1:10:100 model, for every reviewer there are around 10 commenters and 100 viewers, so the user generated content goes a long way and the system stays relatively fresh and relevant.
To me, one of the 100, what this mostly means is that everything around me gets a review. In the newspaper era, a restaurant may be reviewed once every few years, and then only a tiny subsection, usually the high price end of the market, got reviewed at all. Now I can walk down a block of Wilshire Blvd. and find for every restaurant, the white linen nouveau french places but also the taqueria, the bagel store, the deli, this neighborhood's Carl's Jr, not one but dozens of reviews and ratings of which to go to and which to avoid. At least, that's how the system is supposed to work. In reality, the community isn't quite large enough, particularly for non-restaurant reviews, and even among frequently reviewed places the ratings can be highly idiosyncratic. But it helps me to avoid dud restaurants. Ideally.
When (if?) this sort of this becomes truly ubiquitous, all the bad restaurants should close, right? There would be no reason to go to a bad restaurant, at least in a city large enough to have alternatives in a given market segment. Before heading out or making plans, a quick check with the ratings would direct me to something good, or at least something that hasn't turned other people off, and the dirty, overpriced, poorly managed establishments will lose business and either improve or close up shop. That is one dream of the Age of Information, of the great leveling of marketplaces following on the heels of the great leveling of access to information, in this case information on the quality of restaurants. And following an era of the growth of the franchise, which is its own solution to the information problem inherent in variability of independent restaurants, anything to improve quality is welcome.
So I have happily hummed to myself, particularly in the past month of heavy Yelp usage as I learn about my new metropolis. But I also wonder if the Age of Information is a not a difference of type but only of intensity. Information about restaurants is nothing new. People have always shared recommendations with one another. There are plenty of reasons pre-Yelp that I haven't sought out reviews from friends and neighbors before going to a restaurant, and there have been times that I have. In the past month I haven't sought out all that many recommendations in person, easy though it would be easy to chat up my neighbors in the building or on the block, some of whose names I even know. For city dwellers, or most people with a car, there is and has been for decades enormous choice around which businesses to patronize and which to shun, but we seem to have overpriced, mediocre, poorly run institutions all over the place. Yelp probably isn't going to change that. But I'll be happy if I can find lovely places like Zelda's Corner Deli, which without a look at the reviews I would never have wandered in to.
Yesterday's run destination: Stan's Donuts, Westwood Village
Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: overrich peanut butter filled donut
lunch: cheeseburger at the Village Grill in Pomona
dinner: black bean quesadillas
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