Next month, to augment user-uploaded photos of restaurants and dishes on their reviews, Yelp will be offering the ability to upload videos of businesses as well, presumably with audio comment. I'm looking forward to a lot of, "Look at how dry this chicken is. Hashtag learn to brine."
As Business Insider reports, "the idea of the new feature is to help reviewers fully capture the atmosphere of a restaurant, store, or other small business, better than they could with photos alone."
Yelp's mobile product manager, Madhu Prabaker, says he thinks these videos will "be a reward for businesses that go to great lengths to achieve a certain ambiance, whether by having a certain lighting or the music at just the right level," rather than a further source of humiliation and frustration, particularly since they will only be 3 to 12 seconds long, and will inevitably include inane commentary.
Some of Yelp's most overeager and self-indulgent users, the Yelp Elite, will be the first allowed to upload video starting in June, so perhaps if that turns out to be a disaster they will stop. But seriously, what's to keep everyone from turning this into a Vine-style excuse for half-baked humor and unnecessary close-ups of dripping grease, or whatever?
Brace yourselves, business owners. And be on the lookout for people filming their food. But if they're wearing Google Glass, you'll never know.
