Is there room for another app for finding places? That’s a question that Fondu, a New York start-up is trying to find out. The app, which launches today on iOS, is a purpose-built mobile social network designed specifically for discovering places through friends. It mixes some of Yelp’s structure with Foursquare’s tips and Twitter’s short messages.

Fondu traces its roots back to another app called SpotOn, a location recommendation service that debuted in the spring. But instead of providing recommendations based off of a user’s ratings of places, Fondu is trying to build a tool that allows users to follow friends and experts and get ideas on restaurants that are personal to them.

“We know that people have opinions about food and many feel they have good taste but they don’t feel compelled to share on Yelp because it seems like a lot of work and they’re not telling their friends, they’re contributing to the larger community. We want to be a platform to make bite-sized reviews and unlock people’s inner food critic,” said CEO and co-founder Gauri Manglik.

Making places discovery social

Users who log-in are able to follow friends from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or their address book or they can follow other users on Fondu who put out reviews they like. Users can start by reviewing past places pulled in from their Foursquare history. Reviews are limited to 175 characters to encourage quick sharing. They can also rate a place with up to four flower petals, something that was brought over from SpotOn. Fondu organizes activity into a Feed, which allows users to see recent activity from people they follow and nearby activity. There’s also a Popular tab for discovering things that have received a lot of “cheers”, Fondu’s equivalent of “likes.” And there’s a News tab that alerts users to when friends post a review or other people follow them.

As I mentioned earlier, there are features that compete against other existing services. Yelp is a big directory of places reviews that has added social features for following others. Foursquare has tips that are quick suggestions about what to get or do at a place. Foodspotting is also a popular place for sharing dishes and places with people. And Twitter has a similar short-message style and follow system.

But Fondu is still appealing, I think, because it’s designed from the ground up to be a very social and light way to discover places from people that matter to you. Yelp often has a lot of long-winded reviews along with short quick tips, but the place is more of a large resource for finding places and less about following individual users whose tastes align with yours. Foursquare’s tips are helpful but the service is not built around that function. Fondu is more of a Twitter style network that is designed to surface quick tips and short reviews of places. That makes some sense to me because on mobile, I don’t have much time and I just want to get to pithy reviews about what makes a place good.

Recommendation business didn’t work

Manglik came up with the idea of SpotOn last year while studying computer science at NYU. She originally wanted to bring the recommendation experience of Netflix to places. But she found that SpotOn users weren’t as motivated to rate places to get recommendations, something Bizzy also realized the hard way. But people did respond to the idea of sharing directly with friends. She said Fondu is really set up to make that process easy and frictionless while encouraging the kind of personal and casual communication that comes through on Twitter.

Fondu faces plenty of competition, not just from the previously mentioned apps. Newcomers such as Stamped, Oink and Wiket have all recently launched offering to help users get recommendations or ratings about things from people. Fondu will face an uphill battle in gaining adoption with many people who are already used to turning to Yelp or other existing services for places reviews. The iOS app is available today and the web version will come next followed by an Android app soon.

But I’d like to think there’s room for Fondu, which I’ve been playing with for the last couple of days. I love perusing tips on Foursquare, looking for that one dish I shouldn’t miss on the menu. That to me is a real value because it cuts to the heart of what makes a place great and serves it up in a short note. I wish Fondu made it a little easier to see all my friends immediately from the home screen, something Manglik said she’s working on. But overall, I like Fondu from what I’ve seen. A lot of its success will depend on building up a real network and community and that will take some work. But I think there’s a place for it in this crowded market for reviews and ratings apps.

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TripAdvisor, the leading hotel and travel reviews site, will be spun out from its parent Expedia this month, and shareholders are giddy. With 50 million reviews and counting, the site is shaking the travel industry to its core.

Underlying TripAdvisor’s success is a powerful long-term trend: ratings websites threaten to make many brands irrelevant.

Historically, brands were built on the assumption of limited information. As mass production made it possible to sell soap and soup nationwide, companies developed brands to represent quality and cultivate product loyalty. Brands were a natural fit for radio and TV advertising, and brands thrived with the proliferation of cable channels, which kept advertising costs down while offering unprecedented demographic targeting.

With the rise of user-generated content, however, brands have faced challenges. People are talking about brands on social media sites in ways that brand managers can’t control and often can’t even detect. Facebook and Twitter get most of the attention for brand disruption, but the biggest problems for brands are in search and e-commerce.

Take this Google search for Super 8 Motels, for example. On the front page, you’ll see ratings that hotel guests have written about particular Super 8s on TripAdvisor, Yahoo Travel and Yelp. Importantly, the reviews vary widely. When I checked, a New Mexico location was rated 4.5 stars, while a Los Angeles location was at 3.5 stars and one in British Columbia had only 2 stars. Such location-specific information undermines brands’ ability to affect consumers’ purchasing decisions with 30-second TV spots and gives TripAdvisor a powerful position.

TripAdvisor is ahead of other travel sites thanks in part to their use of Facebook-connected recommendations, which help websites make sales by establishing instant trust with visitors. As a potential hotel guest, I am interested in the consensus among previous guests, but I am especially interested in what my friends have said. Reviews can be intensely personal — for example, here’s my TripAdvisor review of a beach resort in Mexico — and if you know the author, it makes a huge difference in how reliable you consider the review.

For the Super 8 brand, the end game could be scary: as TripAdvisor accumulates more and more trusted reviews, the best-performing Super 8s, all of which are independent franchises, may eventually realize that their business is suffering from their association with lesser motels. At that point, we might see a “brand run,” wherein the best locations leave the chain, lowering the brand’s value and ultimately leading to its collapse.

For brand managers, it’s going to get tougher before it gets easier, but our advice is simple:

• Recognize that you’ve lost “control” of your brand and can’t get it back — the Mad Men era is history and the micro-reputation era is upon us.
• Start working with your customer service department to find and fix the worst-reviewed locations or people in your company.
• Start building your own online recommendation and review content so that you have a say in the broader conversation.  Identify happy customers and ask them to review the specific location (or professional) that pleased them.  You can direct them to your own internal review site, or to an aggregator like TripAdvisor, but make sure you give them a direct link and emphasize that recommendations help the individual people that the customer interacted with.  At Stik.com, we’ve found that satisfied customers are happy to spend two minutes to help someone who did a good job, but are generally less motivated to help a faceless company.

For everyone else, sit back and enjoy the ride. The loss of some familiar brands is a small price to pay for more informed purchasing decisions and fewer unpleasant surprises.

Nathan Labenz is a co-founder of Stik.com, a startup that helps people do business with professionals that their friends recommend.

Image courtesy of Flickr user sushiesque.

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