Wes "The VillageMaker" M.'s Profile

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• 
  2/4/2009

  Two years in, and Yelp's still got it.  Only now, as I noted in my 1000th review, the white magic of the internet and the black magic of oil-dependence are battling it out with a whole new sense of urgency, and I think the time has come for me to take that creative energy which Yelp has helped foster and re-invest it in the more immediate task of saving the world, or at least my corner of it.  Not that I'm retiring, mind you (what, and not document the little details that make SF worth fighting for in the first place?), but don't be surprised to see a more compact style of reviews from here on out.  Useful I still intend to be, but the funny and cool torches I freely pass to the next generation (assuming I ever had them).
  
  As for you Yelp, just keep those new features coming.  Because as a programmer, I have to tell you:
  
  [cue Janis]
  
  In this world...if you read the bloggers darling
  Seems everybody's talking 'bout the next thing
  There ain't no website out there good enough
  No laurels on which to be resting
  So if something comes along...
  To give an edge over the competition
  I'd say write it while you can, yeah
  Honey, write it while you can
  Hey, hey, write it while you can,
  Don't you be afraid of bugs, no no
  
  Don't you know when you're adding features,
  You're taking a gamble on some defects
  But then who cares, baby,
  'cause nobody's software is perfect
  And if a good idea should come along,
  Like that review keyword aggregation
  I'd say write it while you can, yeah
  Hey, hey, write it while you can
  Hey, hey, write it while you can
  Don't you be afraid of bugs
  No no no, no no no no no
  
  Aah, write it while you can,
  Honey write it cuz they gonna wanna see it dear, yeah
  Hey hey, write it while you can,
  Don't you be afraid of bugs,
  No no no, no no no no, write it while you can,
  I said hold on to your crown when the others come a knockin' dear,
  Hey hey, hold on to number one,
  Yeah, plan it, design it, code it, build it,
  Test it, debug it, launch it, revise it
  But write it while you can, yeah,
  Honey write it while you can, baby, yeah,
  Hey hey, write it while you can

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• 
  9/9/2007

  Yelp: Come for the reviews, stay for the radical evolution of the city-organism.
  
  For being written in 1961, Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" is eerily prescient; almost all of the factors of city life still apply today...except for one glaring omission.  But I won't fault her for that: of all the great minds of the mid-century, only Marshall McLuhan seemed to see it coming.  I speak of course of the transcendent power that is the internet.  As a programmer I could be biased, but I think it's already started to re-write the rule book of how people interact with cities--and Yelp is leading the charge.
  
  Of course there have been many groundbreaking websites before this, but Yelp seems to occupy a singular vortex where so many concepts--local search, social networking, blogging, Evite, even MMORPGs (after all, would it be a stretch to say that Yelp is like an addictive MMORPG where you gain experience points by going out and exploring in the real world?)--are mixed into something both simpler and far more powerful than the sum of their parts.  Finally, a medium rich enough to sustain the message of...what, exactly?  No, not a populist revolution; that's so 2 centuries ago.  More like a swarm intelligence of sorts.
  
  As a suburban kid growing up in the Pax Clintonia, my impression of city-dwellers was a bunch of bohemian Gen-Xers who reveled in how little technology they used in their lives: no car, no phone, no watch, no computer, etc.  Of course, back then, who could blame them?  Technology was clunky, and they wanted to simplify.  But they were also willing to, say, wait on a corner for a bus in the days before NextMuni.  So it wasn't hard to see the appeal of the suburbs either.  But nowadays, for better or for worse, the internet has become as natural and as essential as a 6th sense, and our lives seem to get simpler the *more* information we have at our fingertips.  Could Yelp and all the other USEs (Urban Sensory Extensions) of the internet finally make the city a bearable place to live even for the impatient, complacent types who have traditionally favored the suburbs?  Could a new energy-efficient urban utopia be on the way, just in time to save the planet?  And could Dosa really be all it's cracked up to be?
  
  Stay tuned to Yelp and you just might find out.

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