Yelp Like You Love It
Mar 3One thing that the Internet is an amazing tool for is the ability to draw on collective knowledge. By being so easy to reach more people, we are able to better understand things. We can, as a society, collaborate and pool our individual pieces of the puzzle to form a more completely picture. I’m getting away from myself with the metaphors. Anyways, I think that one of the more useful applications of this for me is yelp.com.
Basically I like to eat, and yelp helps me do that well.
So yelp isn’t at all a new website, and I kind of think that a lot of people have already heard of and/or used it before. But it doesn’t matter because you know what? I get to post whatever I want to since this is my site. :)
I meant to post this quite some time back, but I’ve been sitting on this post for a really long time. And the only reason is because I wanted to upload a picture before I posted a link to my yelp page. How lame is that? How hard is it to get a profile picture nowadays? It took me all of 2 minutes to accomplish that strenuous task.
Personally I’ve found this site to be pretty helpful, and I think that it’s worthwhile to me to be involved with it. The premise is that reviews will be made by people that actually go to different establishments. While I use the site mainly for food, they do have reviews of everything from shopping to entertainment to health centers.
The most useful thing to me seems to be that you can limit your search by location and see a map of where these places are in relation to where you are. Because even though I might be looking for some amazing food, I’m not exactly willing to drive 50 miles to get said amazing food into my mouth. But 5 miles for some pretty reasonably tasty food? Yeah I could go for that. You can also further filter the results based on more specific criteria such as food ethnicity.
Running off of a 5-star system, it’s easy to quickly see how popular a restaurant is. For more in depth (and often rather interesting) reviews, there are the user comments. These usually range from the short and not-too-helpful to the long and exceedingly useful. Many reviewers will describe their entire meal experience, and it helps you get a feel for what a restaurant is like without actually having been there. Sometimes you can find very useful menu suggestions in the comments as well. To reward reviewers, you can designate their comment as one that you thought was either cool, useful, or funny.
There is even a social aspect to this site as you can add friends on it. I’m not sure if that’s something that I’m really going for. According to yelp, I currently have no friends. Haha let’s hope that’s only on yelp!
My own page, with my reviews and info, is derekwong.yelp.com. Check out some places that I’ve been to, but more importantly let’s all help each other out by supporting quality establishments. You’ll be thankful that next time you’re looking for a place to go to on your hot date. Because we all know that the key to the hot date is the food. Personality? Eh. Charm? Blah. Looks? Well you can’t help that anyways.