Today I had occasion to use my favorite part of the Yahoo! Maps service: Find Nearby Businesses. It’s easy; just put in your location, click “Get Map,” and then choose a link on the right-hand side for Yellow Pages, enhanced with information on distance from you.

I’ve used it to determine that there are some 13 Starbucks locations within a half mile of my aunt’s condo in downtown Chicago, and if you want a hotel near the hospital in West Burlington, Iowa, an AmericInn is right down the (same) road.

Of course, these are national chains. You know each Starbucks is (essentially) the same, but what if you search for, say, florists? How do you determine if “Heavenly Flowers by Esther” is any better than “Heritage Heights Flowers”? Without some sort of Epinions rating or Bizrate review, you’re just guessing.

That’s why I am very intrigued about the possibilities for location-based services for cellular phones, and the promise of not only finding a real-word location, but then evaluating it.

Get shitty service? Hit a button on your mobile as you walk out. Unlike the quasi-polls for the pseudonymous Web-surfing masses, we know almost every cell phone corresponds to a single real person. And using that person’s information, we may eventually be able to have phones that say:

Food. Your current location is 700 feet from a McDonald's. But ratings indicate the cuisine is asslike. Try the Pret six blocks south.

Coda. A note to Y! and anybody else who’s doing the location stuff: bring me a “Find Nearest Showing” movie search! B-don and I mourn the demise of (@Home-era) Excite’s movie theater finder. It didn’t assume that the searcher was non-psycho and thus happily listed theaters hundreds of miles away from the searcher’s home ZIP code. In short, it rocked.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2003 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Miscellany.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.