Yelp has updated its iPhone application with the ability to add short videos (3-12 seconds) to reviews. The app has allowed photo uploads alongside reviews, and according to The Next Web users are uploading over 23,000 photos a day.
You can grab the updated Yelp app now from the App Store for free.
What’s New in Version 8.1.0
They say a picture is worth 1,000 words, well now on iPhone you can take 3-12 second videos of your experiences at your favorite local businesses. So that’s worth like… 30 frames per second multiplied by video length… (pulls out calculator)… between 90 and 360 thousand words! Whoa.
Along with this new feature we also also added some polish to our app and fixed a bunch of bugs. Enjoy!
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel
So much maths…. Still, interesting
This doesn’t help Yelp. Yelp sucks, it has a clunky interface, it’s slow and, most importantly, has unreliable data. (Foursquare seems to keep up with changes…businesses that close or move locations, but not Yelp.) But, do they work on fixing these things, or keep adding stuff to a broken core? I can’t believe Apple was so stupid as to integrate Yelp into Maps over Foursquare, very unlike them to acquire a half-arsed app. Unfortunately, Foursquare has really gone bonkers, now I have to get another app for check-ins??? No, I won’t switch to Yelp, but, I guess I’ll only be using Foursquare to find places, not check in (this is so stupid). I don’t trust Facebook with my location, besides, I have to load the whole social app to check in to a place, too much, too slow, when I’m at work and out of town, it needs to be quick and simple.
It sucks we don’t have a great single app to find places and check in to them anymore…Foursquare was great, and, hopefully will continue to be a great way to find places, but, I think it’s going downhill from here.
I think Apple’s reason for choosing Yelp has more to do with how it used to be the way to find places online…before smart phones…so, supposedly, from a business perspective, it could be useful for not only Maps on iOS devices, but also for the Mac. This was a big mistake, Yelp is outdated, and, as I already stated, has unreliable data. Almost 2 years later and I’ve seen nothing significant come from Apple acquiring Yelp. Nobody uses it outside of Maps, and there, only because it’s included with iPhones. Businesses gave up on Yelp long ago…when Foursquare became popular. Now what? Arg.
It’s frustrating because Foursquare was great for so long. I keep seeing Yelp adding, but never addressing the real problems. I think the problem is, Yelp seems to still base itself on the online experience it started with. They need to hire someone from Foursquare to fix the mobile experience, stop adding stuff to it and fix the core, get more people making sure the data is accurate and current, give the mobile app a total overhaul with a decent UI, they need to start over…dang it!