In separate announcements, MySpace, the social network, and OpenTable, the reservations site, said they would soon begin allowing their users to rate and review restaurants and share those recommendations with friends.
When users visit the new service, called MySpace Local, and review the establishments, their activity will also appear on the MySpace pages of their friends. MySpace is introducing separate guide pages for all the major cities in the United States.
Plenty of other sites already allow you to rate businesses – Yelp, for one. Both Yelp and CitySearch also allow reviews to flow directly into Facebook through a tool called Facebook Connect.
But Jeff Berman, MySpace’s president, claims that this kind of online activity is more relevant in a tightly integrated social context: “When you actually know the reviewer, or can visit their MySpace page to see if she is the kind of user whose judgment you can trust, it matters a whole bunch more,” he said.
Photo by wallyg.