I'm sure given AT&T's laudable history of building huge-scale, world-class websites and their sterling reputation for dealing with customers in a human fashion this site will do excellently.

I agree with the fact that this is doomed to fail. AT&T does own Yellow Pages and they do have a head start in that regard. Wasn't there a story about Yelp being lousy for business owners on HN active list the last few days?

"AT&T came up with the idea for buzz.com about a year and a half ago, says David Krantz, president and chief executive of AT&T Interactive"

He says that so casually, like it was an original idea. And, he's not bothered by the fact that it took them a year and half to launch.

"And, he's not bothered by the fact that it took them a year and half to launch."

Well, considering how long it took Twitter to scale and stop falling over, I'd say taking a little while longer to launch is a good thing.

I don't understand this logic at all. Twitter has learned so much by launching as early as they did, and now it's a huge success. It's better to "scale and stop falling over" while you're improving your product and growing exponentially than spend a year and a half having meetings.

buzz.com is a really good domain name for something like this, but I can't think of a single instance where a Fortune 500 company tried to build a strong community and succeeded.

The joke being, they screw over their customers instead of the businesses being reviewed...

"The site, which is in an invitation-only "alpha" testing phase, is geared toward helping people ferret out the best local businesses using recommendations from friends and family."

Immediately brings to mind: http://www.thumbtack.com/

This has massive fail written all over it if they don't allow users to speak their mind.

If they would really give this a fair shot with their resources they could really make something of it. I'd love to give this a shot if they did this as a skunkworks project rather than their generally top down approach.

Also, while I'm bitching...

http://www.buzz.com/

The logo looks like somebody took the bing font and merged it with the technorati icon, with a near-fatal dose of compression artifacts.

Sorry, AT&T is not my favourite company :-)

How can I get an invitation?

It seems to me AT&T is trying to be more like www.gigpark.com than Yelp. Gigapark was recently sold to Canpages.. the guys operate in Vancouver, BC.

The only way this will be successful is if they manage to buzz.com for a lot, once they've given up.

... but will they let you review AT&T?