The future of mobile? Local, local, local -- and that's exactly what the Yelp-Android marriage unequivocally signals.
Yelp, the growing Zagat guide-meets-social networking hub, introduced its Android app today. Users can search for nearby businesses, browse and read reviews and access a move-able Google map -- you can easily zoom in and out of locations and refine your searches according to desired geographic areas. Like all of Yelp's apps, it's available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Ireland, and reviews can be filtered by "Price," "Open Now" and "Special Offers." The Android app is the 5th member of Yelp's mobile family, which includes WAP, the iPhone, Palm Pre and BlackBerry.
"We've released a lot of apps in the past year -- the BlackBerry app, updates of our iPhone app. This is just the next logical step," Eric Singley, Yelp's Mobile Product Manager, told HuffPostTech. There's so much overlap between Web and mobile users of Yelp that it's hard to pin down the exact number of Yelp's mobile users, Singley explained, but traffic on the mobile site usually increases during the weekend. Last month, 1 million unique visitors logged on to Yelp's iPhone app, he said.
Singley added: "We'll be making an even bigger push next year on our mobile apps."
As will everyone else.
Increasingly, as mobile products become more sophisticated, everything we do revolves around our phones: where we shop, what restaurants we go to, what bars are worth checking out, etc. And popular sites such as Yelp will keep figuring out how to capitalize on the localization of all that data.