
Mockups: How Apple can catch up to Yelp reviews and Google ratings overnight - jonsadka
http://jonsadka.com/blog/how-apple-can-catch-up-to-google-ratings-and-yelp-reviews-overnight/
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rjett
A few thoughts: 1\. Five star rating systems by themselves contain such little
information that they are basically pointless. If there's a critical mass of
ratings, then they can be somewhat useful. Yelp is a 5 star system, but
without the ability to skim a handful of reviews written by other users, it
probably wouldn't be nearly as useful. 2\. The system presented in this post
might work ok for one's personal ecosystem, but as soon as I strayed into a
new city where my contacts were 0 to a few, the utility of this service would
rapidly decline. 3\. For all their pitfalls, Yelp and Google reviews do a
decent enough job at enabling discovery, especially when users take into
account the amount of reviews for an establishment, the specific area they're
searching in, and the specific search term they've entered. Sure, there are
fake reviews, astroturfers, and gaming going on, but it's not too hard for a
trained eye to filter these things out.

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jamesk_au
But a five star rating system that aggregates the opinions of my friends and
colleagues (i.e. people whose tastes tend to be positively correlated with my
own) is much more useful to me than a system that aggregates ratings from some
general, random or self-selecting population.

If I travel to a city where I don't know anyone, it's true that I initially
won't have any ratings (from this particular service), but as I prefer not to
dine alone, it's only a matter of time before I make some friends or meet some
people and I have ratings again.

My experience of Yelp ratings and reviews is similar to kansface's experience
- little correlation with my own tastes except at the far low end. I also
don't know many friends or colleagues who rate or review places on Yelp, but I
think many of us would start rating places if we knew it would be helpful to
our friends, immediately accessible to them, and trivial to do.

~~~
MrDom
_But a five star rating system that aggregates the opinions of my friends and
colleagues (i.e. people whose tastes tend to be positively correlated with my
own)_

You don't befriend people who have different tastes or opinions than you? Most
of my friends don't even like the same food as each other. Some use mac, some
use Windows, some use Linux. How sure are you that those ratings would be more
useful than those of the general population?

Also, didn't facebook try this out at one point? Facebook would seem to me to
be a perfect platform for this type of service.

~~~
jamesk_au
The main reason I have (at least some) confidence in my friends' ratings being
more useful than those of the general population is that the system
approximates what my friends and I currently tend to do, which is go to
restaurants recommended to us by our friends.

We've got tastes and opinions in spades, but when it comes to picking a
restaurant, we're really not that different - our different opinions are
discussed over a dining experience we all want to try and/or enjoy.

If we didn't have a tendency to like the same dining experiences, we probably
wouldn't be eating together in the first place. The 'smart/group average'
example also seems to be a good way of avoiding or minimising that kind of
clash if you don't already know the person.

 _Most of my friends don 't even like the same food as each other._

I'm intrigued by this. I can't think of any particular foods that my friends
would say they don't like or don't eat - except perhaps obviously unhealthy
options with no redeeming features (eg most fast food). I suppose some people
might have a very specific pet hate for something, but usually that results in
that person not ordering that thing rather than the whole group going
elsewhere.

Australia has quite a multicultural society with a rich variety of cuisines,
so that may be part of the explanation. Upon reflection, I'm not confident
that our approach would always be accepted by friends not from here.

Maybe this is all just an example of the hyperlocal being more useful to an
individual than the general. If Facebook implemented it well, and didn't co-
opt each of my ratings into some kind of advertised endorsement, perhaps it
could work there too.

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spacemanmatt
Initial reactions:

1\. If Google did something like this, we'd be hearing from their competitors
about privacy implications from products that read your messages.

2\. Autocorrect (or SwiftKey for that matter) is already obnoxious enough, not
that I would purposely go without. I can only imagine getting spurious ratings
injected to my chats being MORE frustrating.

~~~
kaolinite
1\. That's purely because of trust and reputation. Google is in the business
of tracking people, Apple just wants to sell expensive hardware.

2\. You might be right there, although I'm sure it'd be possible to disable
it.

Overall, I'd love it if they added this. I'm surprised however that Apple
hasn't attempted (or perhaps they have) to buy Yelp - seems like it would make
a lot of sense for them, especially as Yelp is fairly heavily integrated into
iOS anyway.

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mtmail
Yelp has over 2500 full time employees and $3 billion market capitalization.
[http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=YELP+Profile](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=YELP+Profile)

~~~
sanderjd
Huh, really didn't realize they had so many employees. What do most of them
do? Surely that's not mostly engineering staff...

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coke12
They have a TON of salespeople. Only several hundred engineers last time I
heard.

~~~
zaroth
I thought the latest news was that their R&D budget has absolutely exploded?

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Camillo
Off-topic, but I found the example conversation a bit jarring. You know how in
advertising photos people are incredibly excited to be eating salad, yet real
life is nothing like that? The conversation in the screenshot sounds like
made-up copy to me, yet it is ostensibly a real chat between the author and an
acquaintance. So I am left to wonder: are actual people really that giddy
about trivialities in real life? Are they on drugs all the times? Or am I just
an old curmudgeon?

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pavel_lishin
I didn't even read the conversation; my eye passed over it like a Lorem Ipsum
sample.

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archagon
My understanding of Apple is that they're not the type of company that would
add invasive prompts to their users' private interactions in order to improve
their services. (And I'm not judging! I would probably participate if this was
a thing. But it would definitely feel more like a Google move, and the long-
time Apple users would no doubt be livid — unless it was _very, very_ much
opt-in.)

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robertnealan
It's an interesting concept, but I think this would open the door for the
argument, "We added POI recognition so why not add feature Y?" Messages is
supposed to be about communicating via short, concise text-style messages —
adding additional features on top of that will eventually convolute and weigh
down the original intent.

@jreed91's suggestion of having them turn into links that then connect to your
review app of choice seems like an appropriate and minimalist enhancement to
the app (Yelp or otherwise - ideally a configurable option).

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danesparza
Wow. I love the concept, but this is not trivial.

What about spelling mistakes? What about location (if there are multiple
versions of a restaurant -- which one is used? What if your friends have
entered in information for multiple locations of a restaurant)? What about
text that only SOUNDS like its a restaurant -- and yet I get ratings for it.

Also -- what if I only want to share this information with a few friends, not
random strangers that happen to know my number? This sounds like a huge
potential for unwanted information leak.

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nicolasehrhardt
FYI: Yelp and Apple are already in a partnership. Yelp is already in Apple Map
for instance[1].

[1] [http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/19/yelp-
ios-6/](http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/19/yelp-ios-6/)

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Spooky23
The whole point of iMessage is secure messaging for the masses. Mining your
text conversations in flight would pretty much kill all trust in the app.

Plus, why do something this complicated when you have a maps application on
every Apple device. Replace Yelp integration with "iDine" and you're done.

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milesskorpen
I don't think Yelp's secret sauce are there ratings. Review text is critical
to understanding why people rate things highly & generating recommendations
(not to mentioning IDing spam)

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__abc
I personally would not want that visual clutter added. Maybe a simple and non-
obtrusive indicator that upon being tapped, navigates me to a page with
additional details (stars,comments, etc).

I just don't want the "Vegas Strip" of info cluttering up my messages.

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jreed91
Honestly if iMessage could just auto-detect a POI and clicking that would take
me to Yelp, it would be perfect. I don't need any more functionality in
iMessage.

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lobster_johnson
One of the major problems with Yelp and other services is that people review
different things about every experience, yet each place only has a single
rating.

People, not being professional reviews, don't approach reviews like one, and
are prone to attach different meanings to the star rating. For example,
restaurants: On Yelp, people will frequently give a one-star rating due to due
waiters, loud guests, wrong food delivered by accident, slow door-to-door
delivery, lack of accomodation for some primadonna request, imagined slights,
etc. — "...but the food was great!". Such star ratings are nonsensical.

Zagat (when they existed in their original form) had the good sense to
distinguish between different aspects of a business. I can accept rude or
indifferent service or a poor atmosphere if the food is legendary, for
example.

~~~
gcb0
that is true of every user generated content.

youtube videos are mostly garbage. But if you take the time to look for the
good ones, they are much better than what's on TV.

yelp reviews are mostly garbage. But if you take the time to look for well
written ones and base your decision only on those, they are much better than a
probably-also-paid-for-zagat review.

going further, news site with user generated content, like reddit, are usually
garbage. But there it doesn't matter if you look enough, it will still be
garbage, and cats :)

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robg
Does Apple have any way to detect a Point of Interest (POI)? This would seem
to be their challenge today then designs like this could fall out. Am I
missing something?

~~~
spacemanmatt
I doubt it. They provide the platform that many POI-centric apps (aka
location-centric apps) depend upon to detect POIs. My educated guess is, they
have the technology.

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camerondaigle
This gives the user the impression that their phone is reading their text
messages, which feels invasive.

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code_duck
I wouldn't want my messages cluttered with this side mission. Currently
iMessages do one thing and do it well; if Apple added this feature I would
view it as the beginning of a distracting feature creep that was ruining
iMessages.

Most of the time I seek to dine, it has nothing to do with messaging anyone.
When I do, they have iMessages about 1/2 the time. I have no problem firing up
the Yelp or Google Maps apps. They're dedicated to specific purposes and do
what they do well.

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jacobsenscott
Imessages are encrypted end to end according to apple. How do would you
process the plain text without compromising privacy?

~~~
feld
I came here to say the same thing. This can't be done unless all the post-
processing is handled client side. Doing searches on your iMessage contents
would expose the contents of your iMessages to a computer somewhere...

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code_duck
"While Facebook could implement a similar type of rating system, Facebook’s
rating system of Likes is an absolute one that cannot differentiate between
something that is liked and something that is liked a lot, this hindering the
value proposition and usefulness especially in large groups."

Facebook already offers a star rating system for businesses/locations/Pages.
They display your friends' ratings when you visit a page, post your new
ratings in friends' News Feeds and occasionally display a widget enticing you
to rate places you have visited.

It would seem not too out of the ordinary for facebook to in some way display
links to or ratings for businesses you discuss in Messages. I'd be surprised
if they hadn't experimented with that.

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shittyanalogy
This doesn't solve any trust problems, there is still no guarantee that the
ratings can't be covertly skewed. I don't need even more things messing with
my text app and don't want anyone parsing my texts looking for restaurant
names. My friends opinions of restaurants are not generally useful. I can't
see if they have happy hour, wifi, or take credit cards with just 5 stars.
Many restaurants have the same name. Restaurants are location dependent.

Ironically this would be most useful if it clicking on the rating took you to
the yelp page so you could see the details, photos, menu, read reviews, and
confirm that it is the actual restaurant you're talking about.

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zaroth
Jon, fill your profile. First thing, you must file a provisional on this
immediately. It's brilliant. Really, awesome effort.

A provisional costs you almost nothing, and the future gain is totally in your
hands. In 5 years you can sell it to Apple for $5m. Seriously, it's a no
brainer if you have just come up with this, and if it turns out it's unique?
In that case you will be all set, but you need 5 years and $50k within 12
months.

So, crowd source this patent or fucking what? Seriously, take my money.

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seccess
I like the idea, but my first thought was that Apple's iMessage social graph
may not be interconnected enough to work. I think that a rating service needs
some level of critical mass to succeed. Many restaurants on Yelp only have
dozens of reviews globally; if we are going to restrict the pool of raters to
first-hop contacts, I wonder if the average user will have enough contacts to
get a significant sample size.

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falsedan
The context-aware link inserting has been done by Emu (and Yelp integration
too). They were acquired by Google last year, and since have added the [Share
Location] action to Hangouts…

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/02/emu-a-smarter-messaging-
app...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/02/emu-a-smarter-messaging-app-with-a-
built-in-assistant-exits-beta/)

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mrslx
I like it. i rarely read yelp reviews. i prefer the aggregate score(stars). i
would prefer apple made their own system which accounted for 'device+number+
itunes id per vote' so i know there is some mitigation against fraud reviews
and stars because it will map to a person.

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teabee89
Cached version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qNHWy3z...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qNHWy3zcnZEJ:jonsadka.com/blog/how-
apple-can-catch-up-to-google-ratings-and-yelp-reviews-overnight/)

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naspinski
Why is this focused at Apple and not at smartphone operating systems in
general? I am not sure what integration Windows phone has, but Google Hangouts
could at least go across it's messenger system and SMS - might be more widely
spread.

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jedanbik
I can see how this would help Apple and various data brokers, but I can't see
how this would directly and immediately enhance the iMessage experience for
the end user. I would be extremely surprised if this became an added feature.

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etchalon
Can we make this simpler than 5 stars?

1\. It's great! 2\. It's OK. 3\. It's terrible.

For places, that's more than enough.

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boo_radley
Why restrict this to ratings/ POI? Why not books, music, apps and people?

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gd2
Echo, Echo, Echo, chamber.

No, rather not.

