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Facebook is testing a new rating and review service, and that has Yelp investors twitchy:
Facebook wants to tell you about local businesses, including ratings and reviews from your friends and others who have taken advantage of their offerings. If you're thinking, "That sounds a lot like Yelp," you're not alone.
Yelp Inc. shares dove as much as 9.2% Tuesday after Search Engine Land detailed Facebook Inc.'s new desktop Services offering, which appeared with no announcement or fanfare from the world's largest social network.
"We're in the early stages of testing a way for people to easily find more Pages for the services they're interested in," a Facebook spokesman said in an email.
The push to direct its more than 1 billion users toward local businesses is nothing new for Facebook, which launched a service called Places in 2010 with a similar aim. The difference now is the amount of data Facebook has after years of allowing users to check in and rate local businesses, a wealth of info that has been hard for other Yelp rivals to amass. "With 50M Facebook Business Pages, and a global monthly active mobile user base of $1.5B+, Facebook represents a formidable competitor for anyone in local, especially given the ~60%+ engagement of mobile daily active users," Yelp bull Darren Aftahl, of Roth Capital Partners, wrote in a note Tuesday, as reported by Barron's.
[More After the Break]
Facebook is far from the first to challenge Yelp. Alphabet Inc., then operating as Google, attempted to acquire the company years ago, then instead acquired Zagat and put now-Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Marissa Mayer in charge of building a direct competitor, which now is part of Google's dominant search and map offerings. Angie's List Inc. has focused on local services and managed to go public, while startups like Foursquare have challenged Yelp in other areas.
Related: California Outlaws Contracts that Forbid Consumer Reviews
Yelp Will Provide Information in a Defamation Suit
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @02:52PM
People still use facebook?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Nerdfest on Wednesday December 16 2015, @03:51PM
Unfortunately, it's the new AOL. On the bright side, I'm hoping it's the new AOL.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday December 16 2015, @03:51PM
My Cousin Chuck was the valedictorian of his high school, got his master's degree at harvard. He is incapable of using email but is completely cool with facebook.
Oddly he knows how to code in fortran.
There are many people who think that "FaceBook" and "The Internet" are synonymous. I expect that includes most of my friends from high school.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @07:49PM
surely your harvard educated friend has some concerns with advertising and privacy? or perhaps because he can't track people in fortran, it cannot be done otherwise?
I have encountered people that disbelieve if a problem exists if their academic situation doesn't permit it to exist for them locally, due to simply not being a valid construct for consideration in their tiny bubble of influence. I can't program fortran to say 10 print "personalized advertising sucks"; 20 print goto 10, and expect that to work as it does in commodore 64 basic.
(Maybe I need to use a let statement? doh!) But I don't want to let personalized tracking happen, so it can't, and I am secure in my bubble.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday December 17 2015, @03:49AM
they actually know they are ad-fodder. When I explain how they're all being tracked, they all click the Like button.
It doesn't change their behavior.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @06:16PM
What is the a good alternative for that forum? Tumblr?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @07:44PM
I wished for years there was an easier way to communicate with friends and family and I set up websites, email addresses...
nothing worked better than an ad supported platform that cloud.
some of my family members don't even call this thing the internet anymore. they call things based on the application they installed; you dont go to netflix's site, you simply netflixed something. or streamed it. or remote viewing via astral projection or something. it may as well be as far as how it works to them.
cloud streams.... I am sure the word net in netflix will change later to cloudflix or something cute (not like qwickster. how silly. maybe cloudflixistrly?)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @02:53PM
It's called google+