With the success being reaped by location-aware social recommendation sites such as Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and even Google Places, it’s not surprising that a new player wants to join in the party – AT&T. Â According to a report by Forbes, AT&T is currently testing a new social recommendation site called Buzz.com.
The site which is currently on a by-invitation-only alpha mode is geared to provide  “deeper and more relevant” local business searches that will utilize AT&T’s information about local businesses.  Through social connections and technology, AT&T hopes to give  the most reliable and useful search recommendations to users based on what other people’s  favorites and comments.
But don’t think of Buzz.com as just another social networking site despite having some similar features with Facebook or Foursquare.  The site was developed  by leveraging social graphs that already exist. So the site’s would-be members will be able to invite groups of friends from their email contacts or even Facebook profiles and link their activities on Buzz.com instead of duplicating their social networking profiles.
In addition, Buzz.com is not a review site. Â You either post a brief comment about a particular local business or favorite that site instead. Â This in effect will spare AT&T of all the troubles that may arise from not so great reviews about business establishments that might be posted by people.
Buzz.com is set to debut to some 500 users next week . In the meantime you might want to sign up to make sure that you’d get an invite as soon as they let people in.
Originally posted on January 27, 2010 @ 12:56 pm