Nextstop

When looking for new spots in your city, user-review sites're a great resource, provided the place you're researching isn't shuttered by the time you've slogged through Kelly W.'s totally steamy interactions with the cute waiter, the very day after her ferret got sick. Hey Kelly, STFU: Nextstop.

SOMA-based Nextstop's a beta repository for only-positive reviews of businesses and landmarks worldwide, arranged around the holy tenet of brevity; users are heavy-handedly encouraged, via a Twitter-style counter, to limit descriptions to 160 characters -- and miraculously, virtually all of them do!!! Start by punching in a location, cuisine-type, and/or activity, and up'll pop all applicable recs (ranked by relevance, and accompanied by a photo, location/contact info, etc), plus a set of users' applicable guides, which're just individual spots grouped together around a theme, like "Places To Blow Your Tax Refund" or "Places Your Dog Will Love", but somehow, no "Places To Blow Your Dog" (hey, it's still in beta). When you find recs/lists that're on point, you can "follow" their creators to set up a feed of trusted content generators; to further illuminate who's worth his/her salt, users whose recommendations the community digs get a higher "reputation" score, which J. Jett doesn't give a damn about.

If Nextstop woos you into becoming a regular contributor, you'll discover a badge system of green circles, blue squares, and black diamonds awarded to those who write/interact with other users a lot -- a ski-mountainish system that'll remind you of TravisB's 10,000-word tome reflecting on how ski mountain chili is salty. And how about lattes?