Divide and Conquer

Yelp has already garnered attention on this blog, such as Balazs' post noting that they reached 32 million unique users and the incredible success of their iPhone application. And Yelp keeps on adding new features. The highest-profile recent addition might be their OpenTable integration. This is something that I, along with many other users, have been wanting for a while. It just makes so much sense: you look at a restaurant in Yelp, you make a reservation, done. It is perfect.

But this should be taken even further. Why does OpenTable need its own review system? If they already cooperate with Yelp, they should just integrate Yelp reviews on OpenTable. And why does Yelp have to compete with Foursquare by providing the opportunity to check-in in the Yelp app? It would make much more sense to cooperate with Foursquare and automatically pull in check-ins as they happen. This would be a cooperation both companies could profit from: after all, Foursquare could get access to one of the best location databases.

This comes down to a company's fundamental business approach: do I cooperate to achieve the best user experience or do I aggressively move into other companies' business? Luckily, Yelp has now shown that it can also do the former, even if it has already tried the latter.