While Yelp is an online place to read and write reviews of businesses in your city, Sazze is an online place to read and write reviews of products. It moved from closed to public beta yesterday.
As Mashable Paul just noted, there are many product review sites on the web already. Sazze sets out to be “more of a social, well-networked atmosphere for its users than the average consumer is likely to encounter through many existing services.”
Sazze has an obvious bootstrap problem, in that the quantity and quality of reviews need to be established in order to bring shoppers to the site. There are already many products there, but there seem to be almost as many opportunities to be the first reviewer of a particular product.
I took the opportunity to write the first review of the SanDisk Sansa Clip (1 GB) MP3 Player. I liked the ability, the encouragement even, to link from the review to a URI outside the Sazze site. That said, once the review is published, the relationship between the on-site review and the off-site page to which it links isn’t clear.
Sazze has a “blog” that seems to lack two of the essential features of a blog: a permalink for each post, and a feed.
I think it’s unlikely that Sazze will manage the difficult task of boostrapping within a crowded market segment. Being like Yelp is all very well, but Sazze doesn’t have Yelp’s local angle, and so it’s unlikely to develop Yelp’s local sub-networks of members.
Sazze might be hoping that sub-networks will form around product categories. However, most product categories already have their own specialized sites and activity at existing super-sites. For example, last night I did some research on headphones to go with my Sansa MP3 player. I found plenty of reviews at Head-Fi and at Amazon.