Trumblog

I used to be very active on Yelp. I hadn’t added any new reviews in a while, but yesterday I wanted to give a little love to the taco stand where I’ve been getting lunch lately so I added a review and while I was there thought that I’d update my friend list. I go to the friend page and these are the options I get:

Yup, it’s all email based. I can add email addresses or link with my Windows, Yahoo, AOL (people still have AOL email accounts?) and finally GMail, but there is no option for connecting with other social networks. I have a lot of friends on Twitter and Facebook that I would be very happy to connect with on Yelp as well, but I don’t have many of their email addresses.  I could get them if I needed them, but it would take some digging and I’m not going to put in that effort for Yelp.

Limiting the means of connecting with your existing social graph to email is going to be a significantly limiting factor leaving many potential connections unlinked.  All those folks I met at SXSWi and who I’m following on Twitter are probably on Yelp and posting reviews that would be useful to me and drive me back to Yelp, but without a way to merge these social graphs the opportunity is lost.  In addition those connections from other social networks are more likely to engage with another social network than the general population in your and my address book.

My takeaway in 140 characters: Help members import existing connections to a new network with multiple ways to reconnect; Twitter, Facebook & email

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