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As some of you may know, in addition to MoCo Loco, I also work for a small start-up called Praized Media. Today Praized launched a new web tool that may be of interest to anyone looking for recommendations for local places and services in the US and Canada (ie., restaurant, coffee shop, or even a mechanic, plumber, etc). It's called Praized Answers and you can use it to broadcast your question to your friends in Twitter and Facebook, as well as the Praized network. You can ask your question here. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Harry
Here's the official description:
Praized Answers allows anyone to ask a question about local products and services and broadcast it to a selection of social networks (including Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, Friendfeed and Ping.fm). Broadcasted questions are accompanied by a short form przd.com URL to allow social media friends to answer questions in a central place (see example here).
Once they've clicked on the link (see: http://przd.com/q/KbW-TQ0xz), friends can use the Praized answering tools to suggest places (via a search in our North American place database that includes more 17M+ businesses) and add a comment to the recommendation. Once suggestions have been made through our answering tool, the user can then decide which business(es) he's going to contact or visit. After contacting/visiting a merchant, they can vote and comment on their experience using the Praized social tools.
The idea for Praized Answers came to us when we were thinking of the original consumer behavior model, i.e. "the process and activities people engage in when searching for, selecting, purchasing, using, evaluating, and disposing of products and services so as to satisfy their needs and desires" (source: Wikipedia). One of the key sources of business referrals for small merchants is word of mouth. With the rise of social media, it's becoming easier to ask your online friends or recommendations and Praized Answers helps consumers assemble all of them in one central place.
Praized Answers is built on the Praized platform, a free white-label local social networking platform (you can think of us as "Ning" for places). Our platform (available through our API at www.praizedmedia.com) comes with all of the North American business listings you'd expect to find in business directories along with social tools like voting, commenting, tagging and sharing.
