Beta Labs - Yellowpages.com

17 Responses to “Introducing YP.COM”

1. john says:
   July 23rd, 2009 at 2:05 pm

   David;
   what about your paid advertisers on yellowpages.com. I found yp.com on twitter. Based on the ease of typing yp.com vs. yellowpages.com, the public may start to use your beta site and your advertisers paid ads are not mirrored on the beta.
   I can see some upset customers of ATT.

2. Jim Switzer says:
   July 23rd, 2009 at 4:49 pm

   Where did the War Tiger’s blog post go? I didn’t save it, and now no one believes that it was ever there!

3. Dave Hucker says:
   July 24th, 2009 at 9:35 am

   I just got the tweet about YP.com from Greg Sterling ( http://twitter.com/gsterling/status/2804500147 )
   Besides blogger buzz, how do you plan to get word out to the masses about the new site Dave? Are you letting current advertisers know about this to get some usage/traffic going? thanks in advance.

4. Burton Floyd, Jr. says:
   July 25th, 2009 at 7:07 am

   David,
   Helping consumers discover local, particularly on theircells while traveling is still suffering from the same city/state entries (cumbersome) and archaic zip code entries( that have to be either known or looked up).This is the drawback I see in an otherwise great product yp.com . Your url is short.The search for local should also be short. Web searches have applied postal zip codes to locate everything.Since we have over 60 years to add to the zip code data base insuring that every one and everything has its own zip code, the search has to sort millions of possibilities for local information.We have developed the proprietary database that replaces the zip code. Simply, the easily recognizable on the ground term for the location is the same term used to find that local location on the web.In 30 seconds using our database, you know how to find tousands of local merchant communities without once looking up a single term (Zip or city). Unlike the zips, the new codes are geographically recognizable, unique on the ground and on the web.Sound like something we might discuss in reachin our respective goals?

5. Chris Ellis says:
   July 25th, 2009 at 5:16 pm

   David, how does this compare to the Superior Business Network? OR does it? I really like SBN and their social networking platform for businesses, products and services. I value your response. 3rdPartyEndorsement.com Chris Ellis

6. Andrew says:
   July 26th, 2009 at 1:35 pm

   I really like the new yp.com! Have you thought about putting a link to restaurants menus directly on their listing on yp.com? Rather than having to go through their website link and find it on their website? Also, the homepage is really busy. Have you thought about making it simpler (like google) It would be helpful if the sponsored links on the side and top had a small ad like they do on google.

7. Bill Jarvis says:
   July 29th, 2009 at 12:19 pm

   We’ve purchased ads in 7 megazones. In yellowpages.com we’re right where we should be (#2). When looking at yp.com I don’t see us unless I look at the right side of the screen. Since I’m in the process of verifying our yellow pages advertising I realized that with yp.com my ad was not visible. Not only is it on the right side of the screen it is smaller than yellowpages.com. Since we are taught to read left to right, it seems that those of us with premium ads should be placed on the left, with standard ads on the right. Put it up – let us look at it.

8. dblitz says:
   July 30th, 2009 at 10:10 am

   To Jim Switzer,

   Thank you for asking about War Tiger! The Tiger will be back soon. The book is at the publisher, and there will be many upcoming posts…

   War Tiger

9. Galilean House of Worship-GMBC says:
   July 31st, 2009 at 8:38 am

   The map shows our church in the wrong location. How do we get that changed. Several people use Yellow Pages to locate us but could not find the church.

10. dblitz says:
    July 31st, 2009 at 9:57 am

    Galilean HOW
    We are looking into this issue now. Thanks for contacting us!

11. Eric Wu says:
    August 3rd, 2009 at 7:26 pm

    Hi all – My name is Eric Wu and I am the Director of Product Management for YP.COM. Thanks for all your questions and comments. It’s been a busy – but exciting past week so apologies for the delayed response here. As David mentioned, over the coming months, you’ll see this site evolve so think that some of your questions will be answered with time. For now, some quick responses:

    @John: Our goal is to both look at consumer and advertiser value when developing new products and features. We’re trying something different with YP.COM – but with the consistent goal of connecting our advertisers with consumers. As consumer search behaviors change and grow in range, we’re following along and working to create more ways for our advertisers to connect w/ potential customers during the search and discovery process.

    @Leadicious: Thanks for your feedback. We’re continually learning from valuable user feedback, and we also want to find the best user experience for our communities. Having a strong community is important to us, so transparency is definitely top of mind. We’ll be testing and refining the site over time to find the right balance. Definitely keep up the feedback.

    @Dave: Although traditional and online marketing is an avenue to get the word out, we’re also hoping that we can start the conversation with people like you, here on the blog. Along with our advertisers, we would like to have a discussion with consumers, non-advertisers, bloggers, and anyone else who’d like to talk about improving the local experience for everyone online.

    @Burton: We definitely want to provide a clean and clear user experience to our consumers. Rest assure that we’re continually looking for the best solution for our community.

    @Andrew: We are all about creating a better local experience. Since local affects us all, I think we’ve got some great feedback from users like yourself as well as folks here. We’ll continue to explore and listen to feedback, so over the next few months you may see some of changes that will improve that local experience for you.

    @Bill: With YP.COM, we’re not replacing YELLOWPAGES.COM but instead we’re growing a complementary experience to YELLOWPAGES.COM. We definitely value your insights, and as an advertiser your satisfaction is top of mind when making our decisions. Please connect with your sales rep who will be able to discuss how YP.COM is an opportunity to further your visibility online and connect with potential customers.

    @Chris: I can’t speak for Superior Business Network but here at AT&T Interactive, we’re focused on building local search experiences that aim to give users the tools they need to explore locally – across online, while mobile or on the TV. Meanwhile, our 40M monthly unique visitors across our network give advertisers the visibility they need to reach potential customers.

    Hope you all will continue on this adventure with us. Look out for updates to come.

    - Eric

12. Dave Hucker says:
    August 6th, 2009 at 8:44 pm

    Thanks for your responses to our feedback gents.

    By the way, I was trying to enter the feedback/suggestion greybox dhtml on the registration page of yp.com but gave up after not being able to enter the correct words into the security check.

    using Firefox 3.0.13

    I was going to ask a question about ‘claiming a listing’ and then having the facility to change the listing’s phone number or location. Not sure if you guys have gotten that far or have (for security reasons) decided not to implement such a feature, which of course, would be entirely reasonable. Let us know.

13. Eric Wu says:
    August 7th, 2009 at 4:12 pm

    @dave

    Thanks for the heads up. We’re currently using reCaptcha and sometimes it times out. We’re already looking into a solution.

    With regards to ‘claiming a listing’, it’s something we’re looking at, but for the time being you can simply inform us of the updates through the feedback link, which we’ll have working at 100% soon.

14. Dave Hucker says:
    August 11th, 2009 at 1:08 pm

    Good nuff Eric.

    Best of luck with yp.com

15. Martin Duval says:
    August 13th, 2009 at 9:06 am

    Congratulations to the AT&T Interactive team and good luck for YP.com.
    What about your strategy towards an Open YP.com Platform and potential availability of APIs, anything planned ?
    Best
    Martin
    CEO bluenove

16. Greg Walker says:
    August 13th, 2009 at 9:37 am

    Hey David,
    First of all I like the Idea of YP.com and i know many changes are going to be made while studying conusmers patterns and what they like. ON YP MOBILE, is it possible to make it where we can turn the Iphone the long way or horizonal and the screen flip to a horizontal view as with the other features on the phone. This would be a great additon on the next update. This will enable users to type a bit easier and makes viewing easier as well. What is the AT&T interactive staff position on enabling one to go from a verical only view to being able to view the app vertically and or horizontally. Thanks

    Greg Walker

17. Eric Wu says:
    August 13th, 2009 at 11:30 am

    @Martin: Thanks for the warm wishes! We’re definitely excited and looking at many different possibilities to grow and enhance the local experience. Although, I can’t speak to any future plans for an Open YP.COM or API, I would say that it has been contemplated and discussed.

    @Greg: Thanks for the great feedback. I’ve passed along your comments to our YPmobile team.

    Although it doesn’t have landscape mode, you might be interested to know that we just launched a new version of YPmobile for the iPhone. You can upgrade your existing version, or if you’d like you can find the link as well as more information about YPmobile here: http://www.yellowpages.com/iphone

    For future reference, if you’d like, you can provide feedback directly to the YPmobile team through twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ypmobile

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