Location Based Social Media

My friends call me the 21st century try-hard, because no matter how hard I try to use social media and technology off the times, I end up acting like a 90 year-old women that didn't know the internet existed. This is only made more evident when I try to use location based social media sites. It absolutely blows my mind that things can become easier to look up, or that my social media is tailored for my local or surrounding area. The ones that I have the most experience with are Facebook and Yelp, but I will focus on Yelp mostly cause I feel like Facebook is always the example. I actually don't really like Yelp because I think that it is a pretty clunky app. It sometimes is hard to narrow the search for good food that is just becomes overwhelming and useless (admittedly this may be because of my lack of knowledge with technology). I like that you can get real life pictures of other people's food that they have uploaded because it is more realistic than any menu picture that I have ever seen. But back to convenience of the app. I mostly use this when I am out of town or in SLC just looking for a good new place to eat. I think most people already know that if you are in New York, or San Diego, or Portland, there are several wonderful places to try. This app has no function of helping narrow down what the options are really and I think that it is also really clunky in finding which restaurants are the best and closest. I think that while finding a new place to eat a deep cost-benefit analysis needs to happen in a sense that the cost is being more than just literal cost of the food, but also time and distance traveled for the benefit of how good the food is. However, in bigger cities there is "good food" everywhere. Based on my review of this I was not surprised to see that the stocks of Yelp are going down, I was surprised to find that business are using bad Yelp reviews to gain more business. When businesses can use an app like Yelp for the exact opposite reasons that it was used for and gain more customers because of it, I think that it shows that the app is not the most effective. While I think that a lot of people start to use Yelp to find new places, there has to be a large amount of people that are just simply looking for a place to eat regardless of what the reviews are. Maybe there are a few sick and twisted people that get a joy out of going to the worst rated restaurants, but majority I would guess not. I think that as the article explains above some businesses can pay for ads and such, which creates a bias in the availability to the app that restaurants have and the reviews that the restaurant is getting most likely.

There is a similar app to Yelp called Untappd and it is specifically for beer. By location you can look up craft beers that are sold around you and what bars they are available at. All the reviews have to do with the taste of the beer and you can even post a "status" about what you thought about a specific beer. There are also ways to level up once you drink more beers. This gives incentive to drink more and therefore spend more money on local beers, but also give more than just a review feel to the app as well. You can add friends and see what and where they are drinking. I think that this app would be a little better if there was more info about the bars and maybe adding liqueur to the drinks that you can try.