I’m starting do to a quick weekly round-up of the Social Media and Mobile news that I find most interesting.  Enjoy

AOL:

• AOL Journals and AOL Hometown are shutting down (joining Xdrive and BlueString)
  

Apple:

• Apple announces retroactive improvements to “MobileMe”. The following improvements were silently launched in Sept. : http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3182
• iPhone users in the US now get free wi-fi at all AT&T hotspots.
  
• Ralph Lauren launched an iPhone app.  I agree with TechCrunch… They’re better off focusing their mobile marketing dollars and efforts elsewhere…Like ShoZu. 😉 (more…)

Yelp burned a bridge with me this week, and I’m defecting to the Rummble beta.  Rummble is London-based mobile + web 2.0 start-up that provides geographically relevant recommendations and reviews from likeminded people.

My frustration with Yelp started when I got an email from my dentists’ office… Earlier this year, I wrote a glowing review of my dentists, a fantastic couple who took over the practice from my former dentist when he retired.  Noticing that mine was the first Yelp review anyone had written of the new practice, I emailed my dentists to thank them for their great work and let them know about my review.  They replied thanking me for my review.  After my latest visit, I got an email from one of my dentists, checking in to make sure that I was happy because they noticed that my positive Yelp review was no longer posted on Yelp.com.  I went online to look, and sure enough, while I could see the review on my page, it didn’t appear in the public view.  There was only one other review listed – also a 5 star positive review.

Bewildered by why my review was removed, I re-posted it again, and it appeared in public view. I then emailed Yelp to ask what happened.  In the note, I explained that I wasn’t a spammer, but rather a social media blogger with a positive track record of contributing to online communities.  I received the following response:

Hi Lisa,

Thanks for contacting Yelp about your reviews.

Yelp has a system that automatically determines which reviews show for a given business. Just as your Yahoo or Gmail email account doesn’t deliver every email (spam, etc.), we don’t show every review. This protects both business owners (by suppressing reviews that may have been written by a malicious competitor, for example) and consumers (by suppressing reviews that may have a definitive bias, having been written by owners or their friends). It’s important to note that these reviews are not deleted (they are always shown on the user’s public profile) and may reappear on the business-listing page in the future.

I wondered how my review could have been “automatically” removed by Yelp. I am not a spammer.  I have only written a handful of carefully written Yelp reviews, and none of them feature spam-worthy words like “lumberjack”, “rolex”, or “viagra”.  If someone like me (thoughtful reviewer with a track record of social media involvement) was ‘automatically’ screened out by their system, I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of reviews I was missing out on when I used Yelp to discover new places.  I was also frustrated because I took the time to write a review to help the ‘Yelp’ community, and yet, no one in the community could see it.   The worst part is that I felt like my relationship with one of my favorite service providers was compromised by Yelp’s “automatic” screening system, when my dentist was left wondering whether I’d removed the review on purpose.

I wanted to keep liking and using Yelp, so I replied asking what would have ‘flagged’ my reviews to their spam filter.   I asked if was possible to get my review re-instated to Yelp at large.  Here’s their response:

Hi Lisa,

Thanks for taking the time to write us again.

While we can’t evaluate individual cases or re-instate specific reviews, we certainly appreciate your feedback and are continually striving to improve the user experience.

We recognize that this explanation may prove frustrating, but we hope you understand that our efforts and actions are geared toward increasing the overall trustworthiness of Yelp as a place for people to share local knowledge.

Thanks again for caring enough to contact us and for trying to make Yelp better for everyone.

I was disappointed by Yelp’s refusal to evaluate individual cases or explain their filtering criteria.  Yelp acknowledged using an unreliable system to screen out ‘spam’.  Yet, they wouldn’t explain how their filtering ‘system’ worked.  At the end of the day, I was more annoyed by Yelp’s explanation than their removal of my review.

Isn’t the whole point of an online community to allow every user to provide their input and have others flag abuses of the system?!  Wikipedia has a vibrant community and manages to keep its users relatively honest through community policing.

Reading Yelp’s response, I couldn’t help but imagine the customer service agent shrugging her shoulders, sticking out her tongue and making a facetious “I dunno” face.  The image inspired me to do a little research about other’s experiences with Yelp.  So, I Googled “Yelp complaints” to see what came up.  Here are a couple of  interesting articles on the subject:

• On September 19, 2008, CBS 5 reported, “Business Owners Raise More Complaints About Yelp”
• On August 13, 2008, The Register wrote, “Yelp ‘Pay to Play’ Pitch Makes Shops Scream for Help” claiming, “Over the last year, five San Francisco Bay Area businesses have told The Register that the company has offered to “push bad reviews to the bottom” of their Yelp pages if they paid to advertise on the site.”
• In July, 2008, TechCrunch wrote, “Angry Businesses Organize Anti-Yelp Websites. This Is A Sure Sign Of Their Success”:
  

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said recently in the NY Times, “We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third.” Their goal is clearly to make businesses need Yelp, but not to expect a lot of help when it comes to disputes. Complain all you want, you’re just proving that you need Yelp more than they need you.

My recent experience makes me doubt Yelp’s assertion that it puts community first.  Until I have a reason to change my mind, I’m boycotting Yelp.  Instead, I’ll be using Rummble, and encouraging others to turn it into a vibrant and unfettered online community that allows users to share geographically relevant recommendations from likeminded people.  One of the coolest parts is that it allows you to get not only local recommendations but national and international recommendations from your network – a useful bonus for frequent travellers.  If you want to join in, add me as a friend on Rummble.

I’m curious to hear about your experiences with Yelp.  If you’re not a Vox member, feel free to email me your comments, and I’ll post them manually.

According to the August/September 2008 Insight Report from MarketTools, 68% of Americans who spend time online regularly visit blogs, online communities or social networks.  That’s staggering, especially when you consider that the number of online Americans that engage in product research online to help them make purchase decisions is just 33%.

Check out the demographic breakouts and more details on the study here.

One thing the study doesn’t cover, but I’d like to know: What is the percentage is of online Americans who have received a product recommendation through a social network (like Facebook, etc.) have gone on to purchase that product?

Also, if only 68% access social and/or community sites and just 33% are do research on products, what do 100% of online Americans do on the internet? General research? Access email? Search for news?

If you’re a fan of ShoZu, in addition to keeping up with the ShoZu blog, you can now follow ShoZu on Twitter (when Twitter is working!).  ShoZu is sending out regular updates at: www.twitter.com/shozu.  Be one of the first to find out when new destinations are added, how famous people are using ShoZu, what new features are available, and more.

And the number one social network in the world is…IT’S A TIE!  Facebook just caught up to MySpace.  The race to the top gets more and more interesting.  Stay tuned…

Last night, Honda was the first to air a live ad on Channel 4 in the UK.  The ad was nothing short of spectacular – a skydiving feat that no doubt left most of Britain and some of the rest of us talking: Honda Skydiving Video.

I woke up this morning to see links to the YouTube footage of the ad all over the Twitter feeds I follow and in email exchanges between my friends.  Honda’s agency, Widen + Kennedy (which is also an agency for Proctor & Gamble, Coca Cola, Nike, Nokia, Visa, Target, Heineken, and many other large brands) talks about how they executed this socially successful viral campaign on its blog and documented the process of creating the ad in the Difficult is Worth Doing blog.

Imagine what would happen if the guy that you sat next to in high school math class and barely spoke to randomly arrived at your house one morning, 15 years after graduation, ringing your doorbell, and screaming, “POOOOOOOOOKKKKKKEEEE! Remember me? Want to be my friend?!” Then, imagine opening the door and being jabbed in the chest by his index finger.

Sound familiar?  If you’re a Facebook user, it should.  On Facebook, this sort of moronic behavior happens all of the time, and for some reason, because it’s happening on-line, it’s deemed socially appropriate.  Today, a friend sent me the funniest YouTube video I’ve seen all year.  It’s an Idiots of Ants (BBC Three) spoof of what the above Facebook interaction might look like in real life.

The video made me wonder why what seems like a relatively mundane interaction on a social networking site would mortify you or make you laugh or cry out loud, if it were to happen in real life?  Imagine breaking up with your boyfriend or girlfriend and immediately sending paper-based notification letters (adorn with broken heart icons) to all of your friends and co-workers letting them know what happened and that “it’s complicated”.  Sounds silly, so why do people do it online?  My theory is that either they don’t know that they’re doing it (i.e. they haven’t set their profile up to notify their peers of personal changes), or they don’t care (because they can’t see their “friends” reactions and therefore assume that no one is laughing at them).

With all of the recent talk of data portability and the recent announcement of Facebook Connect, it never hurts to have a reminder that Facebook is a bit like to Vegas with a large group of friends… What goes on inside Facebook doesn’t necessarily stay inside Facebook.  And, let’s face it – Facebook interactions aren’t quite as graceful as the interactions most of us are having with each other face-to-face in real life.

Xobni (Inbox spelled backwards), officially opened to the public yesterday.  If you use Microsoft Outlook, it will change your life…  Xobni is a utility for Outlook that analizes your email – things like:

• Who emails you most and when
• Who responds fastest to your emails
• Who you respond to fastest

Xobni makes it easy for you to find files you’ve exchanged via email – regardless of where they’re buried within the thousands of emails in your inbox.

Besides being a really valuable productivity tool, it turns your inbox into a social network.  Without having to type a thing, in two clicks, you can initiate and send an email to anyone in your “network” (i.e. anyone you’ve exchanged email with).  There are also pre-populated notes that enable you to:

• Ask a friend/colleague for their phone number, or
• Request time on a friend/colleague’s calendar – Xobni pulls down data from your calendar and inserts your availability into an email… You can even customize what days/times you want Xobni to search for your availability.

Downsides?  I hate to admit it, but Xobni is actually making me like using Outlook!  The only thing I dislike about Xobni is that it’s not available in more places.  You can’t use it on a Mac or or web-based mail systems like Gmail (sigh).  There is no mobile application or WAP compatability, so it doesn’t work on a mobile phone.

What would I like to see in the future besides broader availability on other email platforms?

• More control over email templates… I’d love to be able to create my own email templates.  For example… “Thank you” emails that I can send to people that, say, had me to dinner, or who I invited to a party.
• Integrations to my favorite web sites. For example… I’d like to be able to set-up an evite from within Xobni and send it out to everyone on my network.  Even better, I’d like Xobni to track my interactions on all of my favorite social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) AND multiple email accounts AND IM AND phone calls (i.e. with a mobile integration)
• Group/ List functionality – that is – the ability to set up groups of people and have the ability to email them all at the same time. (i.e. my “best friend group” my “project X group”, etc.)
• Greater integration with Calendars and Address Books.  For example, I’d love to see the scheduling template be more interactive and actually allow a user to book time on my calendar, without me having to enter the time into the calendar, upon receiving their reply to my email.  I’d love it to work like Outlook invites work… Allow recipients to click on one of the available times listed in an email and automatically book it.

Yep – I think I’m love.  Get it, and it will change the way you look at your inbox.

At Ryan Kruder‘s suggestion, I decided to give “Blog It” a try. Blog It is SixApart’s Facebook app that allows you to update your various blogs, Twitter, and Facebook Status.

BlogIt is an interesting idea… Being able to broadcast your thoughts from one place outward is great. And, yet, doing it from within Facebook is a painful proposition on several fronts – mainly because Facebook itself is slow but also because the app lacks the WYSIWYG functionality of the blogging sites I’ve used before. Sure, I could use HTML, but why bother, when Blog It says, “Some services may remove tags that are not allowed.”? I also haven’t figured out how to tag posts from Blog It.

Ryan brings up a great question in his most recent post, “Do you think of Facebook as a destination for things other than interacting with your friends? What makes something a good FB app v. a stand alone destination site? Would you think of going to Facebook as the place where you write your blog posts?”

I’ve tried to use Facebook as a destination for other things before. When I consulted for SocialMedia Networks, I loaded and played with a ton of Facebook apps. The more apps I added, the slower Facebook got. And, it seems like the more apps I have on my profile, the more regularly the apps crash (which could be perception as opposed to reality). Regardless, performance probably won’t always be the case… As with all web services, I’m sure Facebook will only get faster as it evolves towards improved scalability.

For now, believe that any complex web services/ apps should remain stand alone destinations with the ability to somehow link to Facebook and other social sites. I’d like to see a bookmark mechanism within Facebook that allows me to click to my favorite sites and, ideally, add a button to them that I can press (or an automatic setting that I can establish) to let my friends know when I’ve been active on those sites. Having to go into Facebook to post a note that lets my friends know that I’ve updated my blog is one more step that I’d rather not go through.

Speaking of steps I’d rather not go through… BlogIt has gotten me to thinking… If SixApart can create a Facebook app that can simultaneously publish to Vox and TypePad, why can’t it create an upgrade mechanism that allows me to transfer my Vox blog into TypePad? I’ve been asking about this for a while, and no one has been able to suggest a way forward besides manual cut and paste, which would, after a year and a half of blogging, take forever. When I started blogging, I didn’t care who was reading or what posts generated the most interest. Now, I’m curious. I would love to transfer my account to TypePad and pay for extra features, but I don’t want to lose my existing posts or my URL.

Fingers crossed that since SixApart has demonstrated that it can push text up to multiple blog sites at once, they’ll soon offer vox users the opportunity to transfer/ upgrade their existing content to new platforms.