Over the past year I have been an avid Yelp user. Originally I started using it so that I could remember places I ate out in the city. Yelp was good to be, I found some great places that I can now call some of my favorites because of Yelp.

And when I moved to Philadelphia there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to need Yelp more than ever now.

That being said I have noticed some things that I really wish Yelp did that would be especially helpful when visiting, or moving to a new city.

Recommendations!

There are a lot of places that I love in NYC but I have not been able to easily find their “Philly counterparts”. If Yelp had a way to show you places you might like in a new city based on places you have reviewed and liked before, I think it would be very helpful.

Also if there was a Yelp feature similar to Urban Spoon for the iPhone, but using the data that Yelp already knows about me and places I like to eat. For example if I could select a radius on a map, and just press a button that would give me some suggestions, that would be awesome.

But unlike Urban Spoon, these suggestions would not merely be random, but would be tailored to me.

As many of you know, I am moving to Philadelphia this weekend for a new job. When most people move they have to empty out where they are moving from, organize all their things, pack clothes, ship larger items, but that’s basically it.

Yesterday I started to think about what moving means for all of my profiles all over the web. Most of the sites and communities that I am active on have a location, or a city in the profile. I will have to go through and change my current city on all of these sites. I know this doesn’t seem like that hard of a thing to do, but it can become very time consuming.

Even harder then physically changing your current city, is keeping everyone up to date with your location. People perceive you to be living somewhere, but that might not be where you actually are.

Sites like foursquare help with this. Letting you know where your friends are in your city, or when your out of town friends are in town. But one of the big problems with foursquare is that you can’t see where your friends in other cities are. You are only shown who is in your current city.

I have found that checking in on foursquare had helped my friends to be more aware when I am traveling, or in a new city.

Yesterday I tweeted “Are there any social media sites for moving to a new city”

One person responded and said “Does craigslist count?” Craigslist is great when you are moving and need to sell large pieces or when you need to find and apartment.

But sites like Yelp! can also be very helpful when you are living in a new city. Yelp can help you find everything from good places to eat, to a great place to get a haircut. Yelp has been great for me in NYC, but I am hoping that the Yelp Community in Philadelphia is as active.

Do you know of any other sites that have been helpful for you during a move? Or sites that have helped you settle into a new city? I would love to check them out, so please let me know in the comments.

Of course I have my own personal tour guide to Philadelphia, Drew Olanoff (@drew) <3

But if you know me, you know I am always looking for new sites and communities to check out.

So today I went to my local Apple store with my friend Rosie because her iPhone had gotten the white screen of death and we needed to get it replaced. While hanging out we started talking about Twitter. I was very interested to hear about her experiences with twitter. She has had an account for a while but only started using it regularly this May. She said she started twittering during finals week because she just wanted to tell everyone everything and then she remembered that she could do that with twitter.

She told me that she felt like she didn’t think she was really using it correctly. I told her that there really isn’t a “correct” way to use twitter, but I was curious as to what made her think that.

She had some really interesting insights about how she uses twitter and ways she would like to see it be improved. These were things that I had not really heard from a lot of users or really from the general tech community so I thought I would share them with you all.

The first thing that she felt was missing was a facebook type of “wall-to-wall” view, for your conversations back and forth with one person. I know that there are some apps that do this but Rosie mainly uses the main twitter web page when she is at a computer and twitterific on her iPhone. She would like these features to be built into the main twitter site.
However you can use search.twitter.com/advanced to search for conversations between specific people.

She also was really wishing that she could see her list of followers/following in alphabetical order. This was something I never felt the need for but I was really wondering if other people might find this helpful as well.

Rosie also became frustrated that she could not just DM anyone. She wants to be able to have a private conversation with anyone, no matter who is following who. She said that it was kind of strange that you might be able to have a one-way DM conversation if you were DM-ing one of your followers who then could not DM you back because you were not following them.

Her last insight was that she felt that the interface and general feel of twitter was a little childish. She couldn’t really explain why she felt that way, but I thought it was interesting none the less.

If you want to follow her she is @rosesness on twitter.

I would love to hear your thoughts on her thoughts.