Services like Foursquare are good for checking-in and letting people know where you are but the Bizzy iPhone app is tailored for people checking out locations and letting others know what they think of it.
We were able to hang out with the Bizzy iPhone app team at the SXSW 2011 conference and we had the fortune of going to Guero’s Taco Bar in Austin. This place had some excellent tacos, so we pulled up the app, checked out the location with one of three icons (happy face, meh, and sad face) and left a tip about the tacos.
The goal of checking out is that it helps the community know what are the cool places around the town, not just where people are at the moment. The Bizzy iPhone app also has the quick tips to help guide you to the right dishes or drinks at a place.
Because of this, the Bizzy iPhone app is more of a competitor to the Yelp and FoodSpotting apps of the world. The key difference is that once the Bizzy folk get enough data on your check outs and what you like, it will be able to give personalized, location-based recommendations that should appeal to you.
This is different from Yelp because using that app just finds you all the locations around you and while the stars system gives you an indication of the quality, you really have to spend some time of the long-form reviews to get a real sense for if you’ll like it. The Bizzy iPhone app is promising to offer personalized search results, which could be much more powerful to users and more appealing to advertisers and group-buying participants.
It will be interesting to see how this scales, as all of these services need a critical mass to really be useful. Still, I’m intrigued by this idea, so check out the video below to let us know what you think.