We have put a lot of time and effort into making a local recommendation engine that is primarily powered by your real friends and acquaintances.

I'm not sure how it compares to other sites, but you can see the URL in my profile.

I work for a startup in Sunnyvale that is trying to do something like that.

Would you mind looking at (the web site listed in my profile) and describing what is still missing?

edit: removed link

Why not link it, http://spotlikes.com/?

FWIW I watched the video (all the women have moustaches!) but am no more informed as to how it works. I also looked at the business sign up page but couldn't find any thing there to help work out the mechanics of the process. It looks like you integrate with FB closely?

Thanks for your feedback! I have gotten so little. :)

I was unsure of the etiquette here at HN about pimping one's own site in the body of a post. I saw that others chose to put their site URLs in their profiles, but very few were posting them in comment text.

As 'iamgilesbowkett mentions above, maybe it would be more informative to search over an aggregation of different opinions rather than hash mountains of conflicting reviews into a single byte digest.

For the consumer, our site offers a way to casually discover nearby businesses based on how well they are liked by specific circles of people. All activity is contextualized by location; the target of attention is geo-tagged by lat-long, not the user.

We try to reduce the effort required to browse through large amounts of business listing and business review data. The user should be able to quickly explore a specific area for businesses that match a search term, or are physically close to another (perhaps unrelated) business.

Please feel free to surf around using the business search.

On the site, business search itself is open to the world, but the core social parts require an account to participate. You can enter an object term plus a location. Search URLs can look like this: http://spotlikes.com/discover/places/noisebridge/san-francis...

Due to the founders' interest in Napa and Sonoma counties, we have lots of comments describing San Francisco North Bay Area small businesses. One entry point for browsing might be someplace like: http://spotlikes.com/business/benziger-family-winery-glen-el...

During after-release QA, sometimes I try to do a kind of major metropolitan area hopscotch, visiting all the largest US cities using the fewest clicks.

For the SMB owner, our site offers businesses a place to make a simple listing - a page where they can post their basic details (phone number, URL, logo, etc) - and then sit back and watch the users stream that small referral link out in their activities.

Yes, the site is tightly integrated with Facebook. User comments on business listings can flow automatically into social media sites. If you authorize it, your "likes" will flow onto your FB wall/timeline. We have similar Twitter and Foursquare integration.

We have probably overlooked all kinds of stuff. We move pretty fast. If you would like to call out anything in particular, I am keenly interested in the feedback.