Bizzy’s local business app keeps growing, rolling out with new features in response to today’s mobile environment.  This most recent update incorporates some social features into the app, with the aim of extending more personalized recommendations for local businesses, namely restaurants, about town.  New social features include a feed for discovering new places from within your community of friends, and the Try List, which is a one-click way to keep track of all the places you come across, but haven’t visited yet.

The Try List is actually the notable feature here, acting as an Instapaper-meets-Instagram for locations.  The Try List is a dynamic bookmarking tool that reminds you of the places you’ve been meaning to check out.  You can add locations from your friend stream to your Try List, easily and quickly marking it for later review.  But taking that next step, Bizzy will actually remind you of places on your Try List, showing nearby places when you open the app, and also appearing in relevant searches.  Once you’ve visited a location on your Try List, “check out” there and it will be automatically removed from the list.

If you recall, the check out feature is from Bizzy’s last major update, putting a new spin on the check-in craze.  With the check-out process, you write a review of a place while it’s still fresh in your mind, say, while you’re waiting for the check.  It’s designed to work quickly, so you can give the necessary information and move on with your day.  Incorporating another social layer to this, Bizzy’s pulling in more relevant information around shared locations.   The idea is to facilitate more interaction amongst users, which is another nod to Bizzy’s ultimate goals around search, discovery and recommendations.

What’s interesting about Bizzy’s current feature lineup is that it all works towards creating the most relevant search process for an individual user.  Your social activity and bookmarks are pooled in order to shift results according to your tastes, network and indicated preferences.  What Bizzy has always striven for is a simple way to glean information from users, through inference as well as direct input.   There’s a growing amount of opportunity for detailed consumer data and analysis here, with provisions around location-based sentiment, activity, recommendations and preferences.  Another form of business intelligence, if you will.

For Bizzy, the goal here is to really bring the reviews sector into the modern era.  Founder Gadi Shamia looks at the bigger trends taking place around search, and wonders why they haven’t yet been applied to the reviews business yet.  “Things have grown up around the search paradigm,” Shamia says, going on to relive the offline days of food critic magazines, into the blogging era and even Yelp, which still takes a long-form review process.  “We’re looking to be that next iteration,” Shamia goes on.  “Point, shoot and share for business reviews.  We’ve enabled anybody at the point they are to give their feedback, and this [update] introduces an audience for that feedback.”