•
Here at ReadWriteStart, we've mentioned the importance of credibility as an entrepreneur when meeting with venture capitalists and potential investors, but it is also important to carry that credibility forward into your company as you interface with customers. Amid rumors that it was extorting businesses by offering to de-emphasize negative reviews in return for adverting purchases, social review site Yelp announced Monday that it would be "lifting the veil" on its review system and removing controversial features in hopes of securing customer trust. Sponsor Yelp features a review filter that sorts through reviews of local businesses to determine which is more trustworthy and places the top ones on the business' profile page. Some have claimed that Yelp was helping businesses pick the best reviews to show if that company was purchasing advertising on Yelp, a clear case of extortion that the company has vehemently denied , calling the claims a "conspiracy theory." Now when users visit a business' Yelp profile, they can choose to look over the reviews the filter has automatically reviewed by clicking a link near the bottom of the page near the pagination links (not exactly the easiest feature to find, I had to search for "filter" to find it). Yelp has put a CAPTCHA pop-up between the profile and the filtered results to keep robots from crawling the filtered data. Perhaps this is an attempt to prevent them from figuring out how to game the system. When I tested this new feature on one of my favorite downtown Phoenix restaurants, LoLo's Chicken and Waffles , I saw some similarities among the 25 filtered reviews. A handful were from users who live in other states or who are what Yelp calls "less established users," and some were either very short, or filled to the brim with Internet abbreviations and misspellings or slang. Others, whose content was hidden from view, had managed to violate Yelp's review guidelines or terms of service, which I can assume means a variety of things including profanity or obvious spam. Yelp is also discontinuing the use of the "Favorite Review" feature, which Yelp packed with advertising deals to businesses. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says they decided to remove the feature in hopes of eliminating any confusion. "Despite our best efforts to educate consumers and the small business community, myths about Yelp have persisted," writes Stoppelman. "[The "Favorite Review" feature] led some people to the wrong conclusions about whether businesses could control the review content on their page. (They can't.) So, to eliminate the opportunity for that misconception, we've eliminated the feature." By allowing users to go under the hood and see filtered results, Yelp is, I believe, taking a significant step in the name of transparency and openness. While they aren't revealing any special algorithms for how they determine what makes trustworthy reviews, they are responding in a timely and appropriate manner to the continued allegations of foul play. Regardless of the merit of these claims, Yelp seems bent on securing the trust of their users, a practice every startup should mimic. Also it is important to remember that a certain level of transparency is attractive to users, but not too much. There is a boundary between what should be shared with the community and what should be deeply guarded company secrets, such as fancy algorithms or the inner workings of the site's major functions. Users can trust a company more when they feel they have some sort of insider's view of the company through partial transparency. Simply blogging about the company's activity is sometimes enough to satisfy this need, but other times is may be appropriate, as Yelp has done, to incorporate features which help to underscore the product's attempts at truth, honesty and validity, if those are major facets of your business. Discuss
The rest is here:
Lessons From Yelp's Ordeal: Retaining Customer Trust is Key
Tags:
Business,
CEO Jeremy Stoppelman,
chicken and waffles,
company,
feature,
filtered,
game-the-system,
internet,
internet abbreviations,
lifting the veil,
near-the-bottom,
Phoenix,
review,
small-business,
Tips,
Yelp
•
Google just announced a small but useful update to the chat feature in iGoogle and Orkut , Google's social network. You can now use the chat feature to send photos, documents and other files directly to your contacts. More importantly, though, Google also announced that it plans to finally bring this file transfer functionality to Gmail's built-in chat feature. Right now, if you want to transfer a file to your Google contacts, you either have to email them the file or use the Google Talk desktop app or a compatible instant messaging client. Sponsor To use this feature, simply go to your chat widget in iGoogle or Orkut, start a chat and click on "Send a file..." in the "Actions" menu. The recipient will be able to either accept the incoming file or politely decline the transfer. Chat in Gmail already features video and voice chat, but the file transfer feature is currently still missing. It always seemed rather strange to us that some of Google's instant messaging services like the Google Talk desktop client already had this capability. Now, there isn't even feature parity among the web-based version of Google Talk anymore. Hopefully Google will soon fulfill its promise and bring this feature to Gmail as well. Discuss
Here is the original post:
Coming Soon to Gmail Chat: File Transfer
Tags:
among-the-web,
capability,
chat,
currently-still,
desktop-client,
feature,
file,
google talk,
like-the-google,
news,
orkut
•
We've seen the feature before on services like MapMyRide and surely many other maps, but as of yesterday, we will probably begin seeing it pop up all around the web - elevation on maps. Google announced yesterday that it would be bringing elevation to its Maps API, ensuring a whole new slew of Google Maps mashups. Sponsor The new service, available for use as either the ElevationService class or the Elevation Web Service (which doesn't require an API key to use), provides "the elevation in meters for one or more sets of coordinates" or a select number of points, equally spaced along a path. As Google points out in its blog, the most obvious use for elevation is in planning out something like a bicycle route. "In fact you'll be happy to hear," the company writes in its blog "that the Maps API bicycling directions already factor in elevation". Already, for bicycling junkies like myself, the ability to check out routes and elevations on sites like MapMyRide is extremely useful, if not just really interesting. The mashup on Google's blog post about this new feature shows how the data can be used to give a side-view of any path, alerting you to any unforseen inclines or descents. Aside from bicycling, there are any number of uses for this sort of data - avoiding hills in icy winter travel, figuring out sight lines or just choosing the best route to drive that moving van and not have everything slide to the back end. While there are other services, as we've mentioned, that have already offered this feature, there's something about it coming to Google Maps. We already use Google Maps to plot out our routes and get directions, so why go somewhere else to get elevation? Now, you might not have to. We're hoping this gets added as a standard feature on Google Maps soon. Take a minute to play with the embedded map below and see how the elevation data can be used with Google Maps. Discuss
Original post:
Google Maps API Gets Elevation
Tags:
already-offered,
api,
around-the-web,
data,
elevation,
feature,
google maps,
Maps,
routes,
seeing-it-pop
•
Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times' Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. The company will offer location-based services through its own mobile applications and developers will be able to use this data to develop their own location-based apps on top of a new Facebook location API. Sponsor How Will Facebook's Users React? It will be interesting to see how Facebook's users - who are famously averse to change - will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook "has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns." From Facebook's Privacy Policy : Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate. When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Location-based services have long suffered from the impression that sharing your location online can be dangerous and services like the Foursquare-based PleaseRobMe have only strengthened this sentiment among many users. Even though Facebook offers relatively sophisticated privacy controls, it will be interesting to see if the service's users will warm up to the idea of sharing their location with their friends. A lot of the success of this service will depend on how well Facebook can educate its users and how it implements this feature and the privacy controls around it. Will Facebook's Users Care? It will be interesting to see if Facebook's users are even interested in sharing this information. While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn't seen a very strong response from users and developers so far. Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.? According to the New York Times report, Facebook isn't trying to compete with location-based networks like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare, however. Instead, Bilton argues, the company is far more interested in competing with Google for small-business advertising. This will surely raise additional privacy concerns among Facebook's users. It's also important to note that Facebook's API, will allow intrepid developers (including Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt) to develop interesting location-based services on top of Facebook, however. Discuss
Visit link:
Report: Location Sharing Is Coming to Facebook
Tags:
api,
bilton,
Business,
data,
facebook,
feature,
features-on-its,
friends,
Gowalla,
location,
news,
services-on-top
•
Seesmic will release a major update of its web-based Twitter client Seesmic Web today that will introduce a number of new features like drag and drop list management, TweetMeme integration, threaded conversations and a new way to view and manage your retweets. Seesmic Web now also includes a very handy new contact manager for Twitter. With this new version, Seesmic Web continues to blur the line between desktop and web-based Twitter clients. Sponsor Drag and Drop List Creation The nicest new feature in Seesmic Web is the ability to drag and drop contacts to any list. Compared to TweetDeck and other desktop tools, this makes managing and creating lists a lot easier and makes for a more efficient workflow. Contact Manager Another interesting new feature is the contact manager, which allows you to quickly get information about your followers. The contact manager displays the basic information from the user's profile: number of followers and tweets, favorite tweets and information about the lists this user follows. In addition, Seesmic also displays the names of this user's top 3 most publicly contacted friends on Twitter. Better Integration with Third-Party Tools One area the Seesmic team has focused on for this release is the integration of third-party tools. A small icon appears next to every shortened link now and clicking on this link will bring up some basic information about the link, including the name of the site the link will take you to and the number of retweets (powered by Tweetmeme). Seesmic Web now also allows users to share pictures from the web interface and also offers picture previews right inside the app for pictures that were shared on most of the popular Twitter photo services. Geolocation As long as you use a browser that supports Google Gears, Seesmic Web now also makes it easier to share your location. Whenever you write a new tweet, you can choose to attach your location to this message. Just make sure you have the location feature turned on in your Twitter settings . As we reported last month, only a very small number of Twitter users currently makes use of this feature, which isn't a surprise, given that only a handful of Twitter apps currently support this functionality. It's good to see that Seesmic is making this feature a priority in its apps. Verdict Overall, the experience of using Seesmic Web comes very close to using a desktop client. There are a few features that are still missing in the web version (resizable columns, for example), but otherwise, Seesmic Web is a very good replacement for a desktop Twitter client. Using a web-based client brings a number of advantages with it, including the absence of any Twitter rate limits. If you like the Seesmic interface give it a try in a site-specific browser like Fluid on the Mac or Mozilla's Prism . Discuss
The rest is here:
With New Features, Seesmic Web Blurs the Line between Web & Desktop Twitter Clients
Tags:
desktop,
feature,
functionality,
integration,
lists,
location,
manager,
seesmic,
tools,
Twitter,
user