After this morning’s announcement that Foursquare will become Eightsquare in order to be a “true Yelp-killer,” we have the following advice to give competitor Yelp: “Screw it. Do three apps.”
As The Verge astutely points out, location sharing is never going to be as popular as “sharing a selfie, sharing a link, or firing off a tweet.”
In order to remain competitive with Foursquare’s new brother Swarm, Yelp should pivot its core reviews product into “Twitter for restaurant reviews,” allowing most of the reviewing activity to take place on the microblogging social network. Then it should develop a tandem selfie app, Selfood, to appeal to the modern teenage foodie, and an anonymous app, Snuff, to further take advantage of web trends.
Yelp, too, needs to grow out of its “one app approach.” I mean, why stop at 3? Snapchat also launched an app update today so it’s also a potential threat. Boom: SnapYelp. Fuck everything — Yelp should do five apps, because gotta keep up with the pace of innovation, brah.
Quick to copy Foursquare’s badges and checkins, Yelp needs to get on the unbundling bandwagon if it ever wants to justify its $4.6 billion market cap. “Born mobile” now means twins or triplets.
It’s the future.