Things to Do, People to See

Over the weekend, I went out walking around downtown Seattle. During a session at the Local Color coffee shop at Pike’s Market, I discovered two very cool mobile websites – Yelp and EarthComber.

Yelp is great because it lets you discover restaurants, nightlife, and any other service that might interest you, as well as feedback from other users. It’s not the first time I’ve heard of Yelp, but it is the first time I realized they had a mobile site. If you’ve never been to Seattle, it’s divided into neighborhoods (Belltown, Downtown, Capitol Hill, etc…). So it’s nice when you’re given the option of filtering your search results by neighborhood. I did a search for “pizza” near “Pine St and 8th ave, seattle, wa”. When I filtered the results by neighborhood using “Capitol Hill”, it shows my favorite pizza place Hot Mama’s in the number 2 slot! Very cool.

Another site that’s great is EarthComber. Their mobile site looks fantastic on my Treo. They have a fair amount of overlap with yelp (search by topic, ratings, user comments), but they have some additional functionality. One of the great promises of mobile applications is Location Based Services. They’ve taken a step in the right direction. When you have a friend in your list, and you’re both members, you can see on a map where they are in relation to you. I say its a step in the right direction because each person is still responsible for updating the location. In a true LBS application, your phone location would be known already by the system. With that said, it’s still really cool. Another nice feature is that you can save your location information. So as you revisit places, you won’t need to re-enter everything. Just select it from a list. They do have an option, where you can set the location on the map by using your internet connections’ IP address. I haven’t had accurate results with this, but it maybe enough to get you close enough. I’ll have to try again in a few weeks. Maybe it’ll be better, who knows.