LOCAL CONNECTIONS
In a post sub-titled "Fallow Pages" back in April, I had railed against the lame efforts of the telco-driven yellow pages companies to migrate their content and services to the web. I went onto also complain how sterile the content in "local services" by all the players including CitySearch, Yahoo!, Google, et al seemed to be.
Well, things may be changing.
Yahoo! rolled out a major upgrade to its local service, Yahoo! Local, and it incorporates both user-generated content (in the form of local services reviews and other input), along with RSS feeds (the ability to subscribe to the services for automatic delivery as updated).
These are two of the three features of the currently fashionable Web 2.0 movement, the last one being having open source elements and/or open hooks (Application Programming Interfaces or APIs), for third parties to add/enhance functionality of the the web service in question.
John Battelle spoke with Paul Levine, who heads up Yahoo! Local, and had these observations in his post (links are John's):
I spoke with Paul Levine, head of Yahoo Local Search, earlier in the week and he gave me a tour through the site's new features. What did I see that led me to this conclusion? Two things. One, a major commitment to the architecture of participation - Levine and Yahoo are committed to surfacing user-generated content wherever they can. And two, integration into the recombinant web - at one point Levine called Yahoo Local an emergent "collective wiki for local."
I really like this idea - that of creating a platform based on a need (in this case local) - then letting the users build the service over time. While it clearly controls the dials and levers for now, Yahoo seems to be watching how folks are using the content and services they have integrated into local, then building (or rebuilding) the site as paths are laid down and choices are made by the users.
Levine said he noticed that local searches were frustrating to many because they were often too broad - a search for "San Francisco pizza" or somesuch gave too many results. So Yahoo Local is now driven by the idea of "neighborhoods" for larger cities, a concept which informs and allows all sorts of new interface executions. It also has automatically generated "city pages" which surface the most popular content based on actions of local users. The whole deal is RSS friendly.
Yahoo is leveraging its "buzz" technology in part to create these city pages, and it's also tying in the tagging inherent to its MyWeb social search platform.
I've commented on Yahoo! MyWeb offering a few days ago in the context of providing increasing number of services with unlimited online storage and processing.
Trying out even the early version of Yahoo! Local is encouraging. Here's a listing on one of my favorite Mexican restaurants in my neighborhood, now with a fledgling list of user-generated reviews.
Now, some readers may say "what's the big deal"? Citysearch has had local user reviews of restaurants for years (although they've been harder to find through the increasing morass of advertising and sponsorships).
The difference is that those have been done in a relatively closed system much like Amazon for its product reviews (ASIDE: see my post on how Amazon could evolve this to an open architecture).
Inasmuch as Yahoo! remains committed to opening up this content stream for third party enhancements, there may be something great and new that could emerge organically over time on a mainstream platform like Yahoo!
Google is also focused on evolving its local services while being behind Yahoo! in users of its local services, but has not to date gone in these "Web 2.0" directions.
It's a solid first step in the re-architecting of Yahoo! Local.
Comments