When I think of Yelp, the first word that comes to mind is – reviews.  When I think of Foursquare, the word is “check-in” (a close second is “badges”).  The reality is that Yelp is a reference tool primarily which a rich set of reviews posted by aficionados (usually after they are back from a meal).  This specifically applies to the *mobile* version of Yelp (which is important to discern).  Foursquare on the other hand is a narcissistic tool to broadcast the cool places you are visiting (and earning badges in the process).  I personally have yet to use Foursquare as a discovery tool (and Yelp as a check-in app due to the feature missing on the Android version).

The implication of the keyword stigma is that the check-in feature on Yelp had little impact on Foursquare’s growth trajectory.  The feature isn’t being used because it just doesn’t make sense the same way that it does for Foursquare.

Incidentally, I’m currently reading The Narcissism Epidemic which discusses our evolving narcissistic society in “the age of entitlement” and it seems that this theme is bound to have an impact on which of these companies “wins” in the near future.

Through constructive feedback garnered through the communication channels provided by Crowdspring, designers “improve” their design as you critique.  You quickly weed out the poor designs from the ones worth pursuing further until you have your perfect design.

Crowdspring guarantees a number of responses or they provide a refund.  What they don’t tell you is that a designer may throw out 5 mediocre designs for you to consider and each qualifies as an individual response.  Therein lies the “rub” so-to-speak.  Depending on your bid price, you’re bound to get a varying caliber of designers – and rightfully so.  A hotshot designer is competing with at least a dozen to 2 dozen other designers (known as “creatives”) doesn’t want to waste time on several projects only to find out that he’s lost on all but 1 of the projects.

With my project, I found 80% of the submitted designs to be extremely poor – the other 20% were worth pursuing further.  Considering that Crowdspring takes your payment upfront and charges a 15% “commission” as well, you really have no choice to pursue alternative design channels.  For logo designs, the guarantee was 25 responses which at the outset looks like a fair deal but quickly turns otherwise considering multiple submissions from single creatives.  Pair this with rough prototypes for the initial versions and you get to 25 pretty quick.

Ultimately, I found a design that was professional through an seemingly out-of-left-field designer who submitted at the very last minute making the experience a “close call” and while I’m happy that I got my money’s worth, I’m weary to go through the process again.

Instead, I’d consider 99designs.com, another “design competition” site that has lower rates, higher response guarantees, and a larger base of creatives.

The folks at Twitter recently expressed their difficulties in scaling with RoR – check this and this. They faced moderate backlash from the RoR development community and I consider that to be fairly childish and immature. In general,most members of the community regard the language/platform as the best thing since sliced bread!

The fact is: RoR is relatively new and not enough applications that have grown to the level as Twitter have been built on it to regard it as “enterprise-friendly” – yet. PHP on the other hand – however sloppy it has been in the past – has slowly built itself into a super fast, rich, scalable, integration-friendly language that has a large developer following but not as “connected” to the Web 2.0 phenomenon we’re facing today.

Call me a PHP zealot to balance the playing field out but I think both Ruby-on-Rails and PHP have their boons and brays. However, the long of the short is: RoR is young, sexy, standardized and lucky to be married to Web 2.0 while PHP extendable, flexible, and with a bit more freedom.  With Ruby – Rails is the framework you use.  With PHP, you’ve got a handful to choose from all backed by their own development communities.

We’re seeing the same thing happen with Javascript frameworks (Prototype, Dojo, jQuery, YUI, etc) and with platforms too (OpenLazlo, Apollo, Etelos, and the soon-to-be-launched BungeeLabs).