

AT&T To Launch Yelp Competitor - hackworth
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/26/att-yelp-advertising-technology-business-intelligence-buzz.html?boxes=Homepagechannels

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seldo
I'm sure given AT&T's laudable history of building huge-scale, world-class
websites and their sterling reputation for dealing with customers in a human
fashion this site will do excellently.

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prpon
I agree with the fact that this is doomed to fail. AT&T does own Yellow Pages
and they do have a head start in that regard. Wasn't there a story about Yelp
being lousy for business owners on HN active list the last few days?

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rodyancy
"AT&T came up with the idea for buzz.com about a year and a half ago, says
David Krantz, president and chief executive of AT&T Interactive"

He says that so casually, like it was an original idea. And, he's not bothered
by the fact that it took them a year and half to launch.

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omouse
"And, he's not bothered by the fact that it took them a year and half to
launch."

Well, considering how long it took Twitter to scale and stop falling over, I'd
say taking a little while longer to launch is a good thing.

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dsil
I don't understand this logic at all. Twitter has learned so much by launching
as early as they did, and now it's a huge success. It's better to "scale and
stop falling over" while you're improving your product and growing
exponentially than spend a year and a half having meetings.

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lpolovets
buzz.com is a _really_ good domain name for something like this, but I can't
think of a single instance where a Fortune 500 company tried to build a strong
community and succeeded.

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lallysingh
The joke being, they screw over their customers instead of the businesses
being reviewed...

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ghshephard
"The site, which is in an invitation-only "alpha" testing phase, is geared
toward helping people ferret out the best local businesses using
recommendations from friends and family."

Immediately brings to mind: <http://www.thumbtack.com/>

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thwarted
<http://web.archive.org/web/20000520002726/http://buzz.com/>

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ApolloRising
This has massive fail written all over it if they don't allow users to speak
their mind.

If they would really give this a fair shot with their resources they could
really make something of it. I'd love to give this a shot if they did this as
a skunkworks project rather than their generally top down approach.

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seldo
Also, while I'm bitching...

<http://www.buzz.com/>

The logo looks like somebody took the bing font and merged it with the
technorati icon, with a near-fatal dose of compression artifacts.

Sorry, AT&T is not my favourite company :-)

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trusko
How can I get an invitation?

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faramarz
It seems to me AT&T is trying to be more like www.gigpark.com than Yelp.
Gigapark was recently sold to Canpages.. the guys operate in Vancouver, BC.

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staunch
The only way this will be successful is if they manage to buzz.com for a lot,
once they've given up.

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josh_blogs
... but will they let you review AT&T?

