Montreal Tech Watch

There is a lot of local activity currently on a Facebook application soft-launched by startup Praized late last friday.

The application allows you to vote up (dubbed “praize”) and vote down (“raze”) local shops and places. Since the vast majority of the application’s users are in Montréal, we’ve got then on the homepage the most popular places in the city, such as la S.A.T (home to barcamps, unconferences, and other community events such as Pecha Kucha Montreal) or Station-C, a coworking place favorited by the local digerati. The application has also data from all north American cities, if you want to try it out.

The application in itself is very sticky since the landing page lists the activity streams of users, creating a network effect; pushing you to also praize, comment or favorite those places. This makes praizing more interesting, compared to previous tries. Another new social feature is a points-based reputation system, with a view used as a leaderboard.

So far, I like the application, although I’m still not sure on its objective, whether it’s meant for entertainment or as a useful application. Successful Facebook applications I’ve seen so far are the one that have a strong playing component. Take the example of Movies by Flixster, which could have taken the usefulness path (what are the most praized movies), but have chosen instead to do viral quizzes.

In this case, I’m still left wondering after a while what I should do next — continue praizing around or if there was something special I ought to do.

There was a “aha!” moment though. Try searching for a generic place (such as pizzeria, greek restaurant, bakery etc.) and it will list for you the most praized places.

Which is great because it solves the never-ending question of where to hang out with your friend(s). Try thinking about all the times where you want to invite someone to a special place; and most of the times, you’re left browsing pages after pages of various local directories. Websites like yelp already does social recommendations, but this is even more powerful since the people praizing the places are your actual friends. Thinking about it, it would be even more interesting if it sorts places according to my Facebook friends tastes, or if we can see directly friends who praized it, without having to go the place’s page.

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