How Tagcrumbs approaches local reviews in comparison to Qype

We are often asked how Tagcrumbs is different from popular review sites like Qype or Yelp and why you should favor the one over the other. Yes, there are obvious overlapping use cases but let's do a quick comparison to show in which areas Tagcrumbs is suited best.

Qype is a user-generated local review site where users add reviews about local businesses like shops, bars or restaurants.

With Tagcrumbs you and your friends can add stories, opinions or reviews about any arbitrary place that you discover while on the go or while surfing the Web.

First, this sounds similar, with both services you can read and write interesting reviews for places you have been. The difference is that Tagcrumbs has no thematic focus on reviews and thus supports a higher diversity of user-generated content. It's about all the little local discoveries and the insider knowledge around us, for example:

• a picturesque viewpoint on top of a building
  
• a photographer's favorite motives
• a collection of architectural highlights in a city
• interesting diving spots
• travel experiences
• places for extreme sports
• airplane spotting

Tagcrumbs creates a virtual layer on top of the physical world, where every place can be attached with virtual post-it notes. The good thing, it's not mandatory that you have been at this place, you can also use Tagcrumbs to plan your travels or to plan which restaurants you want to visit while on a city trip.

So what are the advantages of using Tagcrumbs?

• Ease of use and the fastest way to share places of your interests with friends and others
• Powerful mechanisms to discover new content by tags, keyword searches, places or friends. E. g. "Show me all my friends' places around me for the topic architecture."
• We support the author, whenever you add a new place to Tagcrumbs it becomes it's own page with a focus on exactly this content. I.e., it's not one out of many reviews on a local business page.
• Sharing, recommending and adding favorites is well-integrated into the system so the user-generated content can be part of everyone's conversation.
• Support for the geo community with standards like KML or GeoRSS

To conclude, there is a demand for more than just review sites, the world is more diverse and with Tagcrumbs we help all the heterogeneous interest groups to share their insider knowledge.

By the way, here you can see all my Tagcrumbs in the center of Galway visualized with Google Earth. I marked, shared and recommended meeting spots, free wifi cafes, reviewed restaurants, reported about a fire, complained about the bicycle situation and participated in local events. Although very diverse local content, Tagcrumbs as a one-stop 'place book' makes every place stand out on its own.