We had been hearing about the Facebook event and the coming of Places to the social network. The event is live at the moment and you can watch it right here.
The event started off late and it has already got over 5,000 people watching. The announcements are pretty much and in all honesty they look appealing. Some of the key announcement and products to come:
Remember we talked about Yelp upon its release of the Android App last year in December. The application is making headways as it is set to cross one million downloads as users leverage the update made recently.
The latest update lets users share their location on Yelp across other social sites like Twitter and Facebook. The growth has been phenomenal with almost a weekly growth of 50%. Yelp of course has over 2.5 million users actively using the application per month, of which a near half uses Android app. The growth for Yelp has been remarkable in the mobile section, growing faster than competitors like Foursquare. The team has taken up the challenge to make Yelp for feature and function rich and to better stand competing with Foursquare.
There were quite a lot said by Mark Zuckerberg and others in the Facebook team at the f8 and one of them was Instant Personalization. With this, selected websites will be able to provide you a more personalized experience to you based on your public information. This just started yesterday and there are only a few select partners namely, Pandora, Microsoft Docs and Yelp.
All this stems from the ideas that run wild in the heads of the platform’s team; to make Social the default for Web. Sounds cool to say it again and again, but many users find all these moves to be confusing.
As we had earlier promised that we would restart reviewing startups on Startup Meme and have so far kept up with that. The move was made on our readers demand and to stay connected to the roots of this blog, more importantly because I love to talk about new services. Today we have a Yelp for People and its called Betterfly.
While Yelp helps you with places to get your work done Betterfly gets a bit more specific and narrows or should I say expands that to people. Think of it, I recommend you that you can get your car fixed in my city at a particular workshop and compare that to stating that a particular mechanic in that workshop is the best person for the job. Does that make a difference to you? To me it does and there is nothing better than being specific in telling people who the expert or the right person is for a job or anything. Betterfly does exactly that but by helping you find the right individual, a Betterist who can help you learn how to fix your car.
Online brands continue to move toward mobile devices as each one gets more powerful. The latest to step in is Yelp which has now got an app for Google’s Android platform. It already had apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry devices and each has been pretty successful to date.
The app for the Android would be similar to the ones released for other platforms and would determine user location via GPS or your wireless connection. With this, users will be able search for places and businesses close to their vicinity. It has one more value addition as it offers users the option to filter their searches based on prices, the latest trend or what is open at present.
