The first service to feature BooRah's data is Kosmix.com, a small semantic search engine that now prominently displays BooRah ratings and data for most restaurant related searches.

Competition

Yelp, BooRah's most direct competitor, also features a comprehensive set of APIs and developers have already made good use of it while developing mobile applications, especially on the iPhone. The availability of these APIs has given Yelp a clear boost in the past.

BooRah is playing catch-up here, but it does have enough features to differentiate itself from its competition and this API is a step in the right direction. The only feature that seems missing from the API to make it even more useful is the ability to send reviews to BooRah directly.

With the top social networks having 183 million users, 70% of them being 15-34 year olds, Bizzlr realized there was a real need to provide tools to businesses that wouldn't otherwise have the ability to reach their customers on these platforms.

To aid these businesses in expanding their reach, Bizzlr has just launched their turnkey solution, which comes  in the form of an social network application and is currently available on Facebook, MySpace, and Hi5. Support for Bebo, LinkedIn, and Ning is said to be coming soon. The application supports both the Facebook API and the OpenSocial API, so it will work on most of the major social networks.

With Bizzlr, companies, even small ones that don't have their own web site, can connect with their customers quickly and easily on the social networks where their customers spend their time. The fee for doing so is an affordable $19.95/month (or $199/year), so it's not out of the reach of any mom-and-pop shop.

How It Works

Bizzlr uses proprietary algorithms to target customers based on their tastes and preferences. These customers can then easily share the business with their friends, via a modern-day word-of-mouth referral.

For the company using Bizzlr, the app can be a promotional tool used post specials and coupons for their customers to enjoy, as well as a way to maintain a profile page listing their information, phone number, and other news about their company.

Bizzlr in Action

For customers, there's no need to worry about unwanted spam or tracking from these Bizzlr or the companies using it - you have the choice to install the Bizzlr app or not, just like you do with anything else on a social network.

The New Word-of-Mouth

At the moment, Bizzlr focuses on the food and restaurant industry, but will soon be expanding into healthcare, childcare, nightlife, and more.

When trying the tool today, I actually found that it could be pretty useful. I added it on Facebook and entered in my city in the Location box. I could then search for restaurants and add them to "My Restaurants." When adding a new restaurant, you're prompted to tag it, but suggested tags are displayed and pre-checked for you. (Nice!)

On the next screen that appears, you can then see the restaurant's current popularity (both on Bizzlr and with your friends), see it on the map, read news & find coupons (if available), follow the restaurant's activity on Bizzlr, rate the restaurant, add your own comments, and discover similar restaurants. As a final, and optional, step, you can choose to tell a friend about the restaurant. Heck, this is a whole Web 2.0 app built within a social network!

Of course, like so many things, the value in Bizzlr will be directly related to how many people start using it, but if the company can break through that barrier and get enough customers and businesses on board, this could certainly take off.

You were sick of throwing sheep at each other on Facebook anyway, weren't you?

It's a small but interesting site and the basic premise here is something that could be expanded beyond restaurants alone, something the company says it intends to do. I like it a lot.

BooRah uses affiliate services to display menus, make reservations and offer big discounts for restaurants in a long list of cities. These added features are a very nice touch, especially the menu display from AllMenus.com.

Semantic Analysis

The reviews that get processed are identified by semantic analysis identifying food blogs among 100,000 blogs being indexed. That number could be bigger, but it's unclear what percentage of those indexed blogs are in fact food blogs.

Inside the review excerpts you'll find food terms, like a particular dish, identified and linked out to a search results page displaying that same item in the same location you're currently looking at. That's really nice, so if I'm reading a review that says some place's dolmas are alright but aren't the best in town - I'm one click on the word dolmas away from finding out where in town is said to have better ones. Yelp lets you search for terms in a city of course, but making it one click automatically is nice.

I wrote a review this morning and the parsing is a little funky. The key term in my review is "raw," which should be discernible since the culinary category is "organic." Instead, BooRah pulls out a link to "cooked stuff" for searching. That's the opposite of what a user would want in this, admittedly niche case. Food, like many other niche topics, needs strong long-tail analysis - doesn't it? Maybe it's unrealistic to expect semantic analysis to be strong in outlying, long-tail use cases - perhaps full text search ala Google is going to serve said user better. I hope not, though.

Yelp doesn't do a lot of what BooRah does. The final bit of semantics I found on the site was a "semantic cloud" for selected cities. That gives you a good idea what kinds of foods and issues people are talking the most about for a given location and lets you click through to read those reviews.

Further Differentiation

The site searches for reviews across a lot of different sources, depending on the location. Yelp is not included, which is a real shame, but sites like CitySearch, Yahoo Travel, Tripadvisor and many more are included. In some locations the local newspaper website is included in review sources. You can easily filter between sources or chose to just look at food review blogs.

Reviews can also be written on the BooRah site itself. When you sign up for an account you're prompted to select between 3 different charities, presumably ad revenue you generate will be shared with those charities. That's a nice touch. I don't see Yelp doing that, do you?

RSS feeds for new reviews of restaurants in a particular city? I'll subscribe to that! I'd like to have some more granular control of such a feed: new reviews, new restaurants or new restaurants with 3 or more reviews. Yelp has pretty limited RSS feeds.

Finally, the Boos and the Rah's are probably the biggest differentiator here. It is hard for systems like this to recognize things like sarcasm or other peculiarities of human communication - but BooRah seems to be doing a fairly good job in the little bit that I looked around it. I really like the way it pulls out emotive quotes from reviews. My initial skepticism has subsided, but I'll be keeping a close eye on this feature as I use the site more.

Seeing positive and negative reviews around three different parts of a restaurant (food, service and ambience) really is far better than just seeing a number of stars. This method of displaying reviews scales for the individual user, far better than stars and full text reviews do.

The Down Sides

BooRah has been around for a little while but it still feels like its database could be better fleshed out. The user experience is very good, but (for example) the slideshow viewer is broken right now. I don't know about on the iPhone, but on Windows Mobile the site is effectively unusable for me. That's a real shame, as Yelp Mobile is fantastic.

Not including Yelp in the reviews being indexed seems like a pretty big downside. Maybe most of the world doesn't need to read the musings of the yuppie restaurant-philanderer 2.0 crowd, but as one of those myself - I like Yelp reviews. At the same time, it is nice to read what the rest of the world has to say too. In fact, I'm going to try using BooRah instead of Yelp for awhile - when I'm at home on my laptop at least.

Shortcomings aside, combination of semantic indexing and natural language sentiment-processing is a very interesting one. I look forward to BooRah getting better and bringing the same strategy and feature-richness to other niche topics.

Disclosure: I have a consulting relationship with a somewhat related, still-unlaunched, service provider.