yelp

Zocdoc gets between your teeth (hopefully)

Zocdoc is a new service for finding local dentists and booking appointments for times that work with your schedule. It's aim is to replace the often aggravating process of trying to find a local dentist through the overwhelming, and often non-user-friendly directories provided by insurance companies.

Just plug in your city or ZIP code, and Zocdoc will pull up a list of local dentists, along with their daily appointment openings and insurance options. You can sort open appointment times by the type of service you're looking for--e.g., cleanings, Invisalign, or the hallowed root canal. If you find … Read more

Plan trips and find things to do with TripCart

For vacationers in the United States, time off is serious business. Most folks only get two weeks of playtime, and planning what to do and where to do it can be a serious pain. TripCart is a do-it-yourself trip-planning service that's a cross between Yelp and AAA's TripTik service. The site employs a mix of Google Maps, and local attraction ratings--user and editor generated--to let you browse and find interesting things to do. Instead of slurping in content from other services (similar to what Yahoo Local has done with Yelp), the reviews and ratings are site-specific.

The real … Read more

Yelp launches Events, a worthy Upcoming.org competitor

There's no doubt Yelp was going to add a local events and calendaring functionality to their popular user reviews service, and today they've done it with a new feature called Events. Coincidentally, last week brought about a refresh of Yahoo's Local service, which finally integrated Yahoo's own events service Upcoming.org.

Not surprisingly, Yelp Events is quite similar to Upcoming.org, with a landing page for each event, a comment board, and a list of yeses and maybes from community members to say whether they'll be attending. The main difference being the way user profiles … Read more

GameSpot and Craigslist, where did you go?

SAN FRANCISCO--A power outage hit downtown San Francisco Tuesday afternoon, leaving thousands of residents without power and knocking popular Web sites such as Craigslist, GameSpot, Yelp, Technorati, TypePad and Netflix offline for a few hours.

The power failure apparently hit 365 Main, a 227,000-square-foot data center in downtown San Francisco, particularly hard. The data colocation center's client list includes Craigslist and CNET Networks' GameSpot, a sister site of News.com.

It wasn't immediately clear if the other affected Web sites were customers of 365 Main or of other Web hosting companies, or whether the sites were blacked … Read more

Late night food runs 2.0: GopherNow

GopherNow is a simple mashup--mix maps with store hours to help people find eating establishments that are open or delivering late. The service is aimed mainly at teenagers and college students, but for many, the long days of summer can bring unexpected late eating.

Users can search by keyword and location, and a Google map will show up with various restaurants, listing their hours, delivery availability, and for a select few--complete menus. If a restaurant is missing, users can add it in, along with their personal review.

Yelp actually added a similar feature early last month that lets you filter … Read more

Hands-on with Fatdoor: geoSocial networking

Fatdoor is an upcoming social network that's all about location. Instead of creating your network of friends based on interests or real-life relationships, the creators of Fatdoor want you to use the service to get a better feel for your neighborhood and what's going on around you.

The system works by slurping in local business and residential listings, and placing them on a Microsoft Virtual Earth map. While the businesses get pinpoint-accuracy, residential listings are clumped together in a general area, until users decide to claim the house or building as their own. Each user gets their own … Read more

Ethics watch: Yelp's sponsorship program

Recently, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about how Yelp had empowered local restaurant-goers and helped them improve several local eating establishments with their constructive reviews. One thing that caught my eye was the mention of Yelp's sponsorship program, where local businesses can pay for premier placement in Yelp's search results and "sponsor" favorable user reviews so they appear at the top of the list.

The sponsorship program has been around since early 2006, and many businesses have participated in it as a way to enhance their identity on the service. The sponsorship package includes … Read more

Combine maps and spreadsheets with Google's new mashup tool

Have you ever wanted to create your own Google map? Maybe a top 10 list, or some of your favorite eateries. There are ways to do this with Ning and Yelp, but what if you really wanted to make changes later down the road and have those updates pushed out to anyone viewing your map immediately? Google has put together an experimental wizard for creating your own Google Maps mashup using data from Google Spreadsheets. The tool uses APIs from both Google Maps and Google Spreadsheets, but you won't have to know a lick of code, or anything super … Read more

StreetAdvisor: The social network for the street where you live

An interesting new community site launched this morning. And by community, I mean real community: the street you live on. StreetAdvisor is a place to rate your block and meet your neighbors.

The rating system lets you review your street on five main scales (vibe, wired, health, value, essentials), each of which has subscores (for example, the wired scale includes a cellular coverage score). That's a lot of ratings to give, but you can, if you want, just give the main overview scores.

You can also upload video tours of your street, which could be a great resource for people looking to move on to a particular street. It's usefulness, however, depends on people reviewing and rating their streets honestly. It also assumes that real estate pros don't try to game the system by artificially inflating streets on which they have houses for sale (or dragging down scores on streets where they don't). The co-founders told me that have measures in place are in place to help prevent that.

For residents of a particular street, the system's "StreetBoard" also serves as a local resource. It's a social network with an open message board ("StreetShout") for street-related discussion with your neighbors. It also has a wiki-like element: You can find the numbers of local services (police, doctors, post offices) or enter them yourself for others to see.

News Roundup: March Madness on YouTube, Google privacy, and SkypeFind

NCAA tournament clips on YouTube. Just because Viacom has gone lawsuit-happy with YouTube, that doesn't mean CBS wants to keep its content off Google's video-hosting service. CBS will be adding highlights, press conferences and specials available "immediately" following live TV coverage. YouTube users will also be able to vote on and rank their favorite game clips.

Google adding search privacy protections. Google will be "anonymizing" search queries connected to your IP address and browser cookies about 18 to 24 months after they were created. Currently, all three pieces of information are grouped together and … Read more