I'm sure given AT&T's laudable history of building huge-scale, world-class websites and their sterling reputation for dealing with customers in a human fashion this site will do excellently.
"AT&T came up with the idea for buzz.com about a year and a half ago, says David Krantz, president and chief executive of AT&T Interactive"<p>He says that so casually, like it was an original idea. And, he's not bothered by the fact that it took them a year and half to launch.
buzz.com is a <i>really</i> good domain name for something like this, but I can't think of a single instance where a Fortune 500 company tried to build a strong community and succeeded.
"The site, which is in an invitation-only "alpha" testing phase, is geared toward helping people ferret out the best local businesses using recommendations from friends and family."<p>Immediately brings to mind:
<a href="http://www.thumbtack.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thumbtack.com/</a>
This has massive fail written all over it if they don't allow users to speak their mind.<p>If they would really give this a fair shot with their resources they could really make something of it. I'd love to give this a shot if they did this as a skunkworks project rather than their generally top down approach.
Also, while I'm bitching...<p><a href="http://www.buzz.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.buzz.com/</a><p>The logo looks like somebody took the bing font and merged it with the technorati icon, with a near-fatal dose of compression artifacts.<p>Sorry, AT&T is not my favourite company :-)
It seems to me AT&T is trying to be more like www.gigpark.com than Yelp. Gigapark was recently sold to Canpages.. the guys operate in Vancouver, BC.