Chinabites

Posted: Jun. 25, 2008

I’ve placed the tall, frosty glass of haterade that was my original post on localnoodles.com back in fridge.   Yes, this site is a bit of a knockoff of yelp.com, but there is a pretty interesting case study to be observed here.

It appears that this site started off with a large database of business listings in Beijing and used that as the core data.  The whole focus of the site is to encourage community contribution to filter out the most useful content from that original massive directory.  Community participation in filtering the data set is encouraged by game-like features such as the ability to give “compliments” to other members for their reviews and the Local Noodles claim to donate real money to the charity of your choice for each review you put up on their site. Users get to see how much other users have “donated” to charity.  I guess that they end up paying less that way for content, and of course, if you write, you probably end up donating more money to charity than you otherwise would have.

There is a strong set of social networking functions on this site: friendship, the aforementioned compliments economy, and forums (surprisingly absent from City Weekend’s otherwise community content driven site).  As a social networking site, however it’s an attempt at making a walled garden community, which is to say that your Local Noodles login and password won’t work anywhere except localnoodles.com.  Famous walled gardens include the dead-except-for-AIM AOL and perhaps just-jumped-the-shark Facebook.  Marc Andreesen‘s Ning and Google’s open social are betting hundreds of millions of dollars that closed communities are going to fail in favor of a massive opening up of social networks.  And this should hit home to Local Noodles and the other beijing local sites (including chinabites) who should all be watching the ning site bjstuff.com very carefully and asking themselves how they are going to add extra value, because I guarantee that they won’t beat ning on its core competence, pure social networking.  This is subject matter for another post.

Final notes: I really like the make-your-own-guide concept, its a good way of getting the community to find the most useful content in a large data set and automatically caters to niche markets searching for something specific.  The little javascript image browser for looking at images from the restaurants is very compact and decent for image browsing.  Since navigation happens along the top of the screen, there is copious horizontal real estate for displaying info about each restaurant.  Local Noodles is the only site I know of that stores information about the restaurants’ bathrooms, something that is of critical importance to many foreigners eating out in Beijing (this might be mysterious to anyone who has never seen an Asian style squat toilet, or your average Chinese bathroom).  I thought I was the only one who’d thought of that one (but since I haven’t implemented it yet, it’ll look like I’m biting their style).

I first became aware of Local Noodles when they did an adwords campaign and I saw their ads popping up in search results after my google searches. That was nine or ten months ago, since then it looks like the site is getting a little bit of traction, but shows no where near the level of activity of either The Beijinger or City Weekend.

a look at localnoodles.com

Size of directory:

• restaurants 11261 (400 reviewed) (best Chinese local food site had 20471 listings)

Site URL:

• Main site: 12 chars + .com rolls off the tongue and fingers fairly well
• Brand is potentially international

Restaurant URL:

• Restaurant branch url: http://localnoodles.com/review/business_detail.aspx?businessid=703
• Cruft-a-licioius, no one can type or read this

Restaurant search on front page

• 1 click to get the restaurants-only directory
• 1 click to get to the cuisine directory

Interactivity:

• Built from the ground up for community input
• Guides, reviews, blogs, ratings, forums etc.

Information covered:

• Phone
• Address (en cn)
• Price range per couple
• International credit cards
• Toilet
• Good for Mom… etc

Maps:

• Just added mapabc maps with some functional geospatial querying!  Yet another thing chinabites will be having after the competition has already added it.