AT&T To Launch Yelp Competitor

AT&T To Launch Yelp Competitor(forbes.com)

23 points by hackworth 16 years ago | 15 comments

seldo 16 years ago |

I'm sure given AT&T's laudable history of building huge-scale, world-class websites and their sterling reputation for dealing with customers in a human fashion this site will do excellently.

prpon 16 years ago | |

I agree with the fact that this is doomed to fail. AT&T does own Yellow Pages and they do have a head start in that regard. Wasn't there a story about Yelp being lousy for business owners on HN active list the last few days?

rodyancy 16 years ago |

"AT&T came up with the idea for buzz.com about a year and a half ago, says David Krantz, president and chief executive of AT&T Interactive"

He says that so casually, like it was an original idea. And, he's not bothered by the fact that it took them a year and half to launch.

omouse 16 years ago | |

"And, he's not bothered by the fact that it took them a year and half to launch."

Well, considering how long it took Twitter to scale and stop falling over, I'd say taking a little while longer to launch is a good thing.

dsil 16 years ago | | |

I don't understand this logic at all. Twitter has learned so much by launching as early as they did, and now it's a huge success. It's better to "scale and stop falling over" while you're improving your product and growing exponentially than spend a year and a half having meetings.

lpolovets 16 years ago |

buzz.com is a really good domain name for something like this, but I can't think of a single instance where a Fortune 500 company tried to build a strong community and succeeded.

lallysingh 16 years ago |

The joke being, they screw over their customers instead of the businesses being reviewed...

ghshephard 16 years ago |

"The site, which is in an invitation-only "alpha" testing phase, is geared toward helping people ferret out the best local businesses using recommendations from friends and family."

Immediately brings to mind: http://www.thumbtack.com/

thwarted 16 years ago |

http://web.archive.org/web/20000520002726/http://buzz.com/

ApolloRising 16 years ago |

This has massive fail written all over it if they don't allow users to speak their mind.

If they would really give this a fair shot with their resources they could really make something of it. I'd love to give this a shot if they did this as a skunkworks project rather than their generally top down approach.

seldo 16 years ago |

Also, while I'm bitching...

http://www.buzz.com/

The logo looks like somebody took the bing font and merged it with the technorati icon, with a near-fatal dose of compression artifacts.

Sorry, AT&T is not my favourite company :-)

trusko 16 years ago |

How can I get an invitation?

faramarz 16 years ago |

It seems to me AT&T is trying to be more like www.gigpark.com than Yelp. Gigapark was recently sold to Canpages.. the guys operate in Vancouver, BC.

staunch 16 years ago |

The only way this will be successful is if they manage to buzz.com for a lot, once they've given up.

josh_blogs 16 years ago |

... but will they let you review AT&T?