Kevin Marshall's Epic Work Blog for Awesome People

From the 10K Monkey Idea Lab: Yelp + Twitter = Yelpitter

I've started to use Twitter more and more since it's far easier to keep up with people when they distill their thoughts to under 140 characters. Chris Messina and Jeff Atwood are two of may favorite Twitterers.  It's harder to read every blog posts, but it only takes a second to read their latest Twitter when it pops up in Growl via Twitterific.

Anyway regarding Yelp / Twitter.  I was thinking about my old school IRC days in college and chatbots. I think there could be two fun ways to use Twitter and Yelp together and incorporate some chatbot functionality.. 

Yelp Review via Twitter

What I think would be cool is to have a new Twitter user, let's call it Yelp. ¹

When reviewing a restaurant, you would just add Yelp as a Twitter friend and direct message them the name of the restaurant.  Yelp/Twitter would auto respond back to ask what you thought of the restaurant.  You can then respond back to Yelp/Twitter with the review and it's added to Yelp.

(I know the direct message work a little different in the Twitter UI, but this is just for illustrative purposes)

Then on Yelp:

Sure I could just go to the Twitter site on my iPhone and add a review, but it takes far longer in the Yelp UI.  Plus, I'm already using Twitter and I like the forced 140 character review.  Just seems quicker.  I love the simple interaction model of Twitter.

Dinnerlog via Twitter

The next idea is two use the growing "#" tagging convention to track messages about the a restaurant on the Yelp review page.  My friend Dave Bost likes to Twitter his meals, Mmmmmmm.....Cup of Dungeonous Crab & Corn Bisque soup.  It would be great if Yelp would pick up Twitter messaged tagged by restaurant like "#Annie's Bistro, just ate the world's smallest omelette for $11.99" .

The dinnerlog would be displayed on the page like so:

Dinnerlog shows the last 5 posts tagged with the restaurant name.

Unfortunately the Yelp API doesn't seem to support adding reviews so I can really prototype this out.  Although my Hawaiian friend/Fellow U of Illinois alum/Guitar Hero virtuoso Ryan Kanno has recently started a side project creating a local review site called WeGoEat²  I'm going to work with him to try to integrate this functionality into WeGoEat.  If anyone from Yelp is reading this, I'd love to discuss integrating something like this into your site :)

I'll post updates as we get this working in WeGoEat. 

¹It appears someone has squatted on the Yelp twitter name.  Has Twitter squatting become the newest form of cybersquatting?  Thanks for trying to ruin Twitter Tom@blendah.com

²He's convinced only true Hawaii natives no the best places to eat and he's harnessing their collective gastronomique insight. Supposedly their is some advanced algorithm to filter out non-hawaiians.  Maybe it asks surfing trivia or something.