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Is Rummble the next phase in local reviews?

October 25 Mike Butcher

Chuck
a stone into the UK startup scene at the moment and the chances of you
hitting an entrepreneur peddling a site which allows people to share
and rate things - anything in fact - in a local area, are pretty damn
high. Let’s look at one list: Welovelocal, Revmap, Wehanghere, FridayCities, Qype, Tipped and TrustedPlaces. And I’m sure I have missed a few others.

Admittedly not all of these sites have significant funding. Some are
little more than Google Map mashups just ticking over on a server. But
it’s quite clear that not all will survive, and the US market, which is
further down this road, is providing an early view of what might happen
next.

In the US right now there is a shake-out happening amongst sites which allow people to create local reviews. Judy’s Book is shutting down operations. Other players have fallen in the last year, including Zipingo, while Insider Pages was sold for a tiny profit to CitySearch. One of the few remaining, and doing OK, is Yelp, despite fierce competition from Yahoo! and Google.

So
does the shakeout in the US provide an indication of where the UK is
headed? Suddenly the US market seems to have worked out that local
reviews might have something to do with the mobile phone. Whrrl
is a new, principally mobile, service that allows users to aggregate
information as they visit different places. Reviews based on location
are filtered based on ratings via the accompanying social network. Some
commentators are calling it ‘Yelp plus Twitter’.

A wiki format in Whrrl enables users to write reviews, add photos
etc. But the key with Whrrl is that you can filter your searches based
on your trusted network before expanding the search outside that
network. This Facebook-like approach means users have a lot of control
over the information they publish and make visible to their network.
Client software on the phone is supported on about 10 handsets for the
AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile networks. Whrrl’s parent company, Pelago,
has raised $7.4 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers, Jeff Bezos and Trilogy Equity Partners.

Over here in the UK Rummble,
founded by Andrew Scott, is doing something similar, but with a twist.
Currently in closed beta and privately funded, Rummble could be the
Whrrrl for the UK.

You build your social network on Rummble with a basic relationship
(i.e. friend, relation or business) but then apply tags to that.
Rummble has an algorithm which works out which reviews by users in your
network to trust, based on your behaviour and relationship to them.
Three years in development and re-launched from its former incarnation
as Playtxt, Rummble is hoping its functionality between web and mobile
- and ultimately GPS-enabled mobiles - will give it the edge when some
consumers tire of networks which don’t intelligently filter results or
deliver a decent experience to the mobile.

Rummble still needs to be proven once out of private beta. I doubt
we’ll be dumping Twitter for microblogging, or sites like Trusted
Places, for local reviews, just yet. But the more I have looked into
Rummble the more I have noticed several types of services incorporated
into it, from Socialight and Loopt
to location services like Plazes. There is a lot more to this service
than meets the eye at first, and it’s emphasis on mobile is definitely
the right instinct.