Section 1 – Market Profile

A. The announced revolution of social recommendation tools

The need for advice to facilitate decision-making when it comes to planning social activities was not born with the Internet. Word-of-mouth represents 90% of all recommendation sources[1]. However, the first source of recommendation today still is the routine. People actually tend to go back to places they know and where they are known, finding reinsurance against the difficult choice of experimenting the new and to pick which new it will be.

1 - Basic directories

To facilitate people's choice when planning such events, several online services have entered the event-recommendation market, such as Foursquare, Dismoiou, Cityvox etc[2]. They took various approaches as technologies were developing. The first advanced websites to enter the market in the late 1990s that still exist today, such as Cityvox (created in 1999 and online in 2000) are based on the following insight: the consumer knows what he wants, has a precise list of criteria in mind and wants to browse the places matching those criteria. Therefore, they offer a directory of places that can be searched thoroughly. Building on those basic features, first-arrived actors and newcomers integrated consumers feedback and detailed user-to-user recommendation, enabling individual browsers to go past the marketed presentation of places by reading about the actual experience of past customers just like them. The limit of this approach is that the success of consumer feedback turned the online experience on social recommendation websites into a long and focus-demanding task, with the related corollary and necessity to read long posts written by strangers, very often disagreeing with one another, as these all different individuals have different expectations, motivations and criteria in mind when they started their own decision making process and purchase experience.

2 - Social recommendation tools