Zomato crashes and burns...

Culture, Media, General Culture, Chains, General Discussions
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CAUTION. Rant ahead!

I was a “long time” contributor to Urbanspoon. Never felt compelled to go Yelp. Filed close to 300 reviews and nearly 1000 photos to US. Then Zomato swooped in and devoured Urbanspoon and swept up my membership in the “cleansing”. Right off, I noticed some policies with Zomato that really bothered me: Meet ups at restaurants that hosted free dinners for a squad of bloggers in exchange for reviews (solid, pleasant reviews); review and photo “views” numbers that were (are) astonishing–photos I published on Zomato getting 6800 views in less than two weeks… So now, Zomato has suddenly become cash-poor and has closed it’s offices in the U.S. and Canada, and fired more than 300. Zomato owners state that they have revised their mission and will retreat to build and strengthen their existing presence in India, SE Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Good luck with that revised model.

I guess what I’m leading toward is a caution that none of us should trust our intellectual property to any cyber player. Where we park our property may be robust today, and a boney shell tomorrow.

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Urbanspoon was great. Zomato is not. I miss Urbanspoon, it had much better mapping and search results. I used to be able to find new places to try when out running errands in the suburbs based on my location and user rankings. Last few times I tried that with Zomato I gave up, it seemed like all they listed were chains and you couldn’t sort by location.

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Zomato sucks! I loved reading urbanspoon as an alternative to Chowhound.

They have some stupid thing about encouraging photos in order to reach some sort of contributer status. So, this one guy was going around taking pictures of the signage for various restaurants! I also hate how the photos are separate from the write ups.

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