One of the most interesting new ones is qype.com, which models itself on the highly successful yelp.com of the US. Qype started last June as a pan-European site that claims 500,000 visits a month in the UK and is growing at 50% every two months. Rob Hinchcliffe, its UK community manager, claims people are moving away from “time-suck” networks such as Facebook towards socially useful ones that “help make our lives easier as well as fostering online networks and micro communities”. I was impressed that there were seven reviews of a local curry restaurant. From this week, he says, users will be able to post YouTube videos of restaurants or clubs they are reviewing. It also has a stripped-down option for small-screen phones in which you simply insert a street or postcode and what you are looking for.
Interesting contenders include welovelocal.com (which I have already reviewed); trustedplaces.com, which is building up reviews from users; and outside.com, which homes in on postcode data from local galleries to Burke’s Peerage (though typing postcodes into Google can be just as good). Mygamma.com, which has been nominated for a Best Mobile Social Networking award, looks promising but kept sending me back to a mobile gaming site, which was disconcerting.
Another one, gypsii.com, which has just landed a contract with China, was slow to load but looks interesting: you select where you are and it tells you how far other restaurants, interesting houses etc are with user-generated photos - though it had a disconcerting habit of producing restaurants thousands of miles away. Others include, touchlocal.com (where, in theory, you can read others’ views of local plumbers), toptable.co.uk, beerintheevening.com, plus, of course all the local interest you can find on our own Guardian sites such as guardianrestaurantbookings.co.uk. And all this is without mentioning Google’s as yet unrevealed plans to capture this space for itself.
