Bizzy, which is owned by ReachLocal, started out as a pretty interesting SMB CRM tool. But a decision was made that there wasn’t enough SMB interest or consumer momentum there and so Bizzy has been totally redesigned and reimagined as a local recommendation engine.
You answer a series of questions about places you like to eat, shop, etc. and you establish a profile. Over time more questions are asked and the profile becomes more detailed.
There are no “friends” and no “following.” I can see other “people like me” and users are matched together by answers and “taste” (see “taste graph”). Recommendations are then made about places I or you might like.
The new Bizzy completely does away with the old site and the concept behind it. Mobile apps are of course coming.
Bizzy founder/CEO Gadi Shamia told me that SMBs were more interested in acquiring new customers than in having “conversations” with existing ones. That may well be true and it may also be a function of the weak economy. Regardless, Bizzy’s new objective is to help people discover new places.
The new Bizzy is a cousin of Fablistic (and to some degree Buzz) and a nephew of the old TrustedPlaces, which conducted a kind of taste inventory for new users in an effort to find like-minded people (that’s gone now however).
Zync was a local recommendations site that was acquired a couple of years ago by Where and no longer exists (though Where is doing interesting things with the concept). Indeed “recommendations” is the past and future of local search to a degree.
Google and others talk about “searchless search” (recommendations) as a new frontier. But recommendation sites have come and gone over the past several years. Now with the advent of smartphones and the mobile Internet they are rising again. And Bizzy hopes to be one of the first of this newer wave to capture consumers’ imaginations.
Take a look and tell me what you think. Do sites like Bizzy represent a viable alternative to more conventional local search?
November 2nd, 2010 at 12:49 am
Thanks for the shout-out, Greg. I like Bizzy. I do think it will be more interesting than a vanilla local search site once they get a critical mass of user opinions. I’d say we’re at least kissing cousins
Both of us are focusing on common tastes and interests as the key to smarter (ie more personalized) search and discovery. The difference is Fablistic allows users to save/share/discover recommendations for anything, not just local businesses. So books, movies, tv shows, video games, websites, wines, etc. I think users will like Bizzy.
November 16th, 2010 at 8:39 am
[...] joins a list of attempts to create “recommendations engines.” Bizzy is another one that recently (re)launched, transforming from a SMB CRM tool. I know there are others with plans in this area [...]
December 1st, 2010 at 7:18 pm
[...] None have been particularly successful or memorable. But now there’s a new crop, including Bizzy, Google’s HotPot and now WHERE’s new app, which I wrote about this morning over at [...]
December 6th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
[...] None have been particularly successful or memorable. But now there’s a new crop, including Bizzy, Google’s HotPot and now WHERE’s new app, which I wrote about this morning over [...]
December 6th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
[...] recently launched online recommendation site, Bizzy, confronted me with a much more extensive battery of questions about tastes, preferences and [...]
December 14th, 2010 at 1:50 pm
[...] Bizzy transformed from a CRM tool for SMBs to a recommendation engine for consumers a couple weeks ago. The site has now launched a complementary iPhone [...]
December 28th, 2010 at 7:01 pm
[...] repositioning or relaunching as “local discovery” engines. WHERE and ReachLocal’s Bizzy are two recent examples. Google itself has HotPot and the more amorphous “contextual [...]