YellowBot.com
November 6, 2007
I’ve never really been a fan of business directory listing types of websites; they tend to seem poorly designed, and I’m never sure about trusting the reviews. YellowBot.com has my interest for the moment, though, with its nice, clean interface and handy google maps. You have to register (it’s free) to write reviews or recommendations, but you can use the service to find a business and read reviews without doing anything special. YellowBot’s thing is that it’s a “local” search site — I’m not entirely sure how that makes it different from other business directories. In true Web 2.0 style, it also supports tags for each business. Give it a try!
November 9, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Hi Fitz,
Glad you like YellowBot! We’re hoping to continue what we’re doing and finding users like you. Please make sure to give us feedback and let us know of any feature requests you may have in our forum:
http://www.yellowbot.com/forum/
We were a bunch of coders an open source fans fed up with all the other options out there so we built YellowBot to not only be trustworthy, but provide you with an overview of what other sites think of these businesses. You can find reviews and information from other sites aggregated on the site as well. Take a look at this example:
http://www.yellowbot.com/driskill-hotel-austin-tx.html
November 9, 2007 at 10:03 pm
Hey, that’s a nice touch, including reviews from other sources — I hadn’t noticed that. I see that you guys have a couple of charts related to the ratings — does YellowBot plan on including any other types of data visualization?
November 14, 2007 at 7:26 pm
We don’t plan on adding any additional info at the moment. Here is another example and a description of how the info is used:
http://www.yellowbot.com/ezo-dinning-sushi-bar-west-hollywood-ca.html
The location above has an overall rating of 3 out of 5 stars
The distribution summary (red/green/yellow/etc bar at the bottom of that section) shows the ratings all over the place so it is not 3 stars because people voted at either extreme or because there was a consensus that it was 3 stars).
Take a look at the line graph demonstrating the ratings over time and you see that people rated it highly but the restaurant, according to users, has gone downhill. It’s rated a 3 because it was rated highly but, as time went on, people liked it less and less for one reason or another (you can read the reviews to find out specifics).