The idea of a text file at the root isn't a bad one, but the format of the document should be far more descriptive.<p>Have you looked at <a href="http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html" rel="nofollow">http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html</a> and the examples there?<p>Everything in the example given is encapsulated by schema.org and that would describe it in a way that was unambiguous.<p>I know that schema.org has been dismissed because "The problem is that it's too complicated for a non-developer", but I would say that for a non-developer this file is also too complicated. Most non-developer small business owners can barely use FTP or use the Wordpress admin. These people don't have a robots.txt and won't create a business.txt<p>I would argue that making business.txt schema.org formatted and then to use a simple generator wizard to produce it would be more accessible to the small business owner than giving them a text file to edit.
So more senseless errors in my error log and more traffic caused by robots requesting a file that doesn't exist?<p>While I applaud the idea, can we please, please have a meta-tag or header that points to the location of this file if it's available?<p>We don't need another favicon.ico nor robots.txt
hostname.com/business.txt is wrong.<p>You are supposed to use the /.well-known/ subfolder.<p><a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5785" rel="nofollow">http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5785</a><p>If you plan to implement a "standard" please try to review the RFCs that have covered this ground before. There's probably already a standard which may fit. If not, there's probably one that's close you could propose a change to. And if you're trying something genuinely new, you'll at least be on the right foundation.
I like the idea a lot, but as it stands the format is pretty US-centric. I've written up some suggestions on how to fix this at <a href="https://github.com/fesja/businesstxt/issues/2" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fesja/businesstxt/issues/2</a><p>The core problem is definitely that many small business sites, especially restaurant ones, are really terrible outdated, and really not run by someone who would understand the concept of "upload text file to server".<p>So perversely, storing the information centrally would be easier, but who would you trust with it? The temptation to create a walled garden and "monetize" all that juicy local business data would be very strong for the maintainers. And then everything falls apart into small localized non-interoperating fiefdoms again, and we're back where we started...
Why not just use Microdata (which Google already supports):<p><a href="http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146861" rel="nofollow">http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...</a>
I think this usecase is already covered very well by microformats and the various metadata standards that already exist and are supported by Google, Facebook et al.<p>I'm not sure the argument that these are too complicated for non-developers really works here, after all uploading a file to the root of a web directory is likely also too complicated...
"Without business.txt he would have to go to all the websites like Yelp and Foursquare and..."<p>No. No no no. This is not how the Internet is supposed to work. I search for a restaurant online hoping they have a website with this information on it. If it's a chain, I can find the local location and know the information is correct. If it's a local place with a website, the information is probably outdated anyway because they don't edit the site when their menu and hours change ... which means they're not going to edit business.txt to reflect the changes. So I'm really trying to find a phone number to speak to a human or listen to the answering thingy so that I can verify their hours.<p>This proposal is to help automate updates on <i>other</i> sites when the restaurant changes their menu or their hours. The only way this is going to work is for the computers that help manage the restaurant are also providing information to the website. Need to change the menu? Great, the changes are also pushed to the website. Changing the hours employees can clock in? Comes with a requisite change to operating hours and is reflected on the website.
I like this idea very much and its simplicity, but it seems inevitable to me that going down this path will just recreate RDF[0] and RDF Schema. A sort of a semantic web version of Greenspun's tenth rule[1].<p>For those of you who want to quickly get up to speed on RDF/Schema, "A Semantic Web Primer for Object-Oriented Software Developers"[2] was to me a very good introduction.<p>[0] From the W3C primer on RDF: "The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web."<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/SE/ODSD/" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/SE/ODSD/</a>
The schema is rather US-centric. For instance, many countries don't have "states". They may have other divisions, in the 0..N level range, with other names. It would be better to research and use a current, established format for international addresses.
How well does the business.txt standard hold up against malicious behavior? For example, what happens if I want to defame Restaurant X, so I make restaurantXsucks.com and put a business.txt file in my root directory with the same address and contact information? Currently, Google Places (the service that puts stuff on Google Maps) mails a PIN to the address and requires verification before listing to mitigate this problem -- how would business.txt mitigate the problem?
So just skimming through the comments here, the "standard" alternatives to the proposed business.txt include (but are probably not limited to):<p>• HTTP Headers<p>• Meta-tags<p>• <link rel="business"> tags<p>• RFC 5785 (/.well-known/ folder)<p>• Microdata<p>• Microformats<p>• RDF Schema<p>No wonder we are in <a href="http://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/927/</a> territory...
Regardless of the format of the content, I think that it'd be nice if files like this would be placed in /.well-known/[standard] in accordance with <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5785" rel="nofollow">http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5785</a><p>There are already too many magical files cluttering up the root.
Why do business people try to push business standards as technical solutions? That's not what standards are for, they are for technical problems. It looks like DRM to me: a technical solution to a social problem or a broken business model.<p>TL;DR: there are existing solutions, micro-formats for example.
How about internationalization?<p>Shouldn't this be self-descripting - like indicating language code (use ISO...) of the narrative/description?<p>Also, how about country codes? I mean - some people use U.K., some UK, some England, some United Kingdom, etc
This – in some form – is probably a good idea. Recently, I've worked on a few Business Improvement Area projects and one of the hassels for BIAs is keeping up-to-date information for each business (i.e., hours of operation, services, description, etc). So, this type of implementation would be great.<p>I think what I really get from this is that each business needs some form of public API.
Now we need a reviews.txt so that we don't need to give control of the reviews to less than trustworthy parties.<p>I propose:<p><pre><code> [company/product name] (URL)
score: X/Y
[review text]
--
[next review...]
</code></pre>
E.g.:<p><pre><code> Frank's Pizza Place (http://franks.geocities.com)
score: 8/10
Good service and food. Doesn't accept credit cards.</code></pre>
Does anyone have the contact of people in "Data harmonization" team of Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, etc? Could you share this idea with them to see if we can discuss it further?<p>my email is javier at touristeye.com
Is it missing fields for e-mail and logo? Or have you specified this actually somewhere (i.e. not just examples?)<p>I think this is great idea, however Google has something like this already (microformats based) <a href="http://maps.google.com/help/maps/richsnippetslocal/" rel="nofollow">http://maps.google.com/help/maps/richsnippetslocal/</a> maybe adopting this would be easier?
Yext (<a href="http://www.yext.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.yext.com/</a>) offers a paid solution for exactly this issue - they sync local business info across 35+ different sites (Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, etc.)<p>Disclaimer: My significant other works there. But I wouldn't recommend it if it weren't useful/relevant/awesome.
Tried visiting <a href="http://www.touristeye.com/business.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.touristeye.com/business.txt</a> ,was throwing a 404 error. Is it just me or?
Great idea. Added one for our company. It took just a couple of minutes.<p><a href="http://pierlis.com/business.txt" rel="nofollow">http://pierlis.com/business.txt</a>
I like the idea of having a standard place to find this information. It's still <i>for robots</i> though isn't it? Why not include this information in robots.txt?