Marie C. Cassandra

You know what really sticks in my craw? That no ONE is doing matching of reviews for products/services/restaurants/whatever based on reviewer profiles similar to your own.

For example, the age old problem. You arrive to a new exotic destination, and want to find a place to grab coffee so you open TripAdvisor/Yelp/Foursquare/Your App of Choice and the highest rated coffee shop is… Starbucks. Now look, there are times when a Sbux comes in handy in a pinch, so even though it’s easy to slam/hate I’m not going to. But as a general rule, I avoid chains like the plague and the first place I want to visit is someplace truly local – that I couldn’t experience in Main Street, USA. So the opinions of a traveler who’s first stop is Hard Rock Cafe, Olive Garden or McDonalds….well, we lead very different lives and we’ll leave it at that, but their data is not useful to me.

While the travel industry is a great example – they’re by all means not the only company I’m disappointed in. Top of the list of disappointment is Amazon. I expect them to be all over this in the. I know, I know, they *kind* of have this with their “People who shopped/purchased this product also shopped/purchased” feature. To me, that was a great start. It’s totally useful and people love it – but it doesn’t seem to have evolved much further than the original.

Oh and I won’t stop at travel & e-commerce. Netflix where are you on this?! If you rated Two and a Half Men 5 stars, well, this is a judgement free zone (of individual people, clearly not of the companies I’m calling out, I’m judging them hard) . You do you man, but we clearly have very different tastes, and if this was a conversation IRL we’d quickly realize we have no common ground here and change subjects since discussing TV shows will be of no use to either of us. What is particularly infuriating is that Netflix HAD THIS FEATURE! Does anyone remember that – when they first introduced the viewer profiles feature many years ago they had a percentage match between your tastes and the tastes of your friends. What happened?! My theory, is that the baby got thrown out with the bathwater as they removed the “social” element of viewer profiles. But of course, I have no idea (if you do, please share!).

To me, this seems like the natural evolotion in reviews. We started from the world where Experts/Critics ruled to the pendulum swinging to the other side where the voice of the masses reigned. Yelp quickly became a running joke, so back the pendulum swung to bloggers taking off. Because we realized the opinion from 1 person who’s taste profile is trusted/more similar to our own is indeed 100x more valuable than than the ‘average’ of 10000 strangers with dubious tastes. But now we find ourself in a fragmented siloed world where it’s a lot of work to discover and vet each individual blogger and find their content.

So in summary: What do I want? Review ratings from people with similar reviews to my own. When do I want it? Ummm, try 5 years ago? I’m seriously perplexed as to why none of the leading tech players are tackling this. Any time I bring this up (I’m really fun at a party you guys), everyone is like “Yeah! Great point! Why don’t you do a start-up or something??” Well, I think that’s super naive. There must be some reason that the players that have the data, expertise, and resources aren’t doing this – right? Or am I being naive? Please share your views, I’m desperate to know.

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