CitiPals – A Network of Trusted Reviews for your city

We have had more than a dozen social networks targeted @ various Indians. Ashish Baluda and his brother Manish have come up with a new network, which borrows the concept of networking, listing and reviews for your city. Ashish said,

Opinions of reviewers are good but opinions from your “friends” are priceless to help you make the right choice. There’s an implicit level of trust you associate with folks you know. CitiPals captures this and provides trusted recommendations by weighing in your social network higher. Opinions of folks in your social network are not only weighted higher as you peruse information on CitiPals, they are also displayed prominently along with your ‘relationship map’ to that user. Your social network on CitiPals comprises of friends ( and their friends, up to 3 degrees ) as well as users you trust. Over time, you might start trusting some users whose opinions have helped you, and/or whose tastes are similar to yours. These are users you trusts, and CitiPals allows you to mark them as “trusted reviewer”, and include in your social network.

CitiPals currently covers covers food & dining, nightlife, health, wellness, beauty and movies and entertainment. Coverage is available for Mumbai and partly for Pune as well. Does this remind you of burrp! ? Indeed, similar concept except that CitiPals is building on the “Trust” relationship network. Additionally, CitiPals wants to aggregate content from other trusted Bloggers and Web 2.0 sites.

I asked Ashish, why couldn’t they build CitiPals as an application on top of an existing Social Networking site like Facebook where there are setablished networks, to which he said,

I guess one could look at Citipals that way. But we essentially want it to be more than that. Just like MovieMatch is a fun application, we will be building more applications on top of the platform. We will in the future build some of our applications to work on facebook but to rely upon facebook for registration might not work. They are not the de facto and other sites don’t have APIs yet.

So burrp! now has a competitor 🙂 I am sure even CitiPals have plans to go Mobileeee.