Posts tagged as:

location

Yelp proved its value yesterday. Mostly.

2010.04.11

I like Yelp, the site that crowdsources people’s opinions and gives ratings on restaurants, stores and service businesses. I also have the Yelp application on my iPhone. I don’t use either one of them much at home, because I pretty much know which restaurants I like and where they are.

But I’m in Seattle this week for SAS Global Forum, our annual user conference. Yesterday morning I decided to use Yelp to find a place for breakfast. (Eating at the hotel restaurant always feels a bit like giving up.) So I opened the Yelp app, selected Restaurants as my category (they have lots more categories too, like Banks, Gas & Service Stations, Drugstores, etc.) and filtered by price and walking distance. It also lets you filter by which places are open at the time you’re looking, which is obviously pretty useful.

I found a half dozen or so candidates, and picked a Spanish restaurant with great reviews called Andaluca, because I thought it would be fun to find out what a Spanish breakfast was like. I clicked on the Directions button, which opened Google Maps and showed me how to get there. Really cool.

Like so many of the coolest iPhone apps (TripIt, Layar and Foursquare), Yelp really shows its value when you don’t know where you are or what’s good.

The restaurant turned out to be small and elegant, with a nice wait staff. And a breakfast menu exactly like the one in my hotel. What Yelp hadn’t told me was that it actually is a hotel restaurant itself, so it’s Spanish at night and generic ‘Mercan in the morning. I had a chicken sausage hash with poached eggs. Tasty, but I doubt that’s what they were eating in Madrid that morning.

I won’t blame that on Yelp, though. But I did go in and leave a quick tip on Andaluca’s Yelp page that said, “Nothing Spanish about the breakfast menu.”

Tagged as: location, Seattle, yelp

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Fear of geek robbers

2010.02.20


Mashable makes an extremely valid point in the debate about the safety of location-based apps. As you’ve probably heard, there’s a new tool that aggregates public check-ins from location-based apps that users have posted to public places like Twitter and lets you search them by zip code. (I’m not going to link to it or even call it by name. I think it’s completely irresponsible to create something that exposes other people’s vulnerabilities, whether or not you’re claiming to do it for their own good.) My friend Wayne Sutton has a good rundown of the whole issue.

I used to worry a lot more about security and anonymity on the Web. I’ve relaxed a bit, although I still try to use common sense. I’ve stopped accepting Foursquare requests, for instance, from people I don’t know. (For one thing, if I don’t know who you are, why would I care where you are?)

But here’s what it comes down to for me: I was burgled twice in my old house, almost certainly by the same people (they entered the same way, were very tidy, and only took consumer electronics that could be easily sold – I assume they waited until I had replaced everything before coming back a second time). Those people robbed my house because it backed up to the woods, because I didn’t have a back porch light and because there was no one there to see them. Also, I’m sure it was clear I wasn’t home.

In other words, I’m not worried about a crackhead with an iPhone casing me on Foursquare, when the vast majority of the robberies in my town are someone kicking in a door or breaking a window, grabbing a laptop or a DVD player and running. If the typical burglar around here had a device that he could use to check Foursquare or Gowalla, he would have sold it by now.

Tagged as: foursquare, gowalla, location, security, wayne sutton

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