TeachStreet™

Though TeachStreet is here to help you find those sewing classes and pottery classes here in Seattle, there are numerous folks around the country, in verticals other than local learning, seeking to help people filter local listings. Here are some folks down in the Bay Area whom you may or may nor already know about.

Laborfair:
Laborfair, a San Francisco based company, is geared at helping folks find local service providers, be they landscapers, carpenters, or plumbers. Craigslist is out there, yes, as are numerous other directories, but the idea behind Laborfair is to improve the experience, both for consumers as well as for service providers.

How? Well, on the consumer side, they do this by furnishing personal references and reviews to help people make better informed decisions before they hire someone and bring them into their home.

On the service provider side, Laborfair provides web presences to workers whom may not otherwise have websites and essentially acts as a lead gen service to help them grow their businesses.They are currently only in California, but will be rolling out nationwide in the coming months.

Yelp
And of course, not to be overlooked is Yelp. Just as many of you are, at TeachStreet, we’re huge fans of Yelp. Though they’re a bit further along in the ol’ process :-), Yelp has done for restaurants seekers what, in many ways, we’re seeking to do for class takers: provide a filtered, map integrated, local search experience complete with reviews.

By creating a very active community (not to mention implementing some pretty good SEO!), Yelp has emerged as the preeminent place for restaurant reviews and has assumed the web presence that Zagat and CitySearch were probably better positioned to achieve several years ago.

Friend Connect
Though from a feature standpoint, Google’s latest addition to the Open Social platform doesn’t do nearly what the above sites do, the Friend Connect app is very much in line with the idea of using reviews to educate consumer decisions.

Basically, as mentioned in Google’s press release, the app allows developers with an easy way to bring in social networking components to their sites, even if the primary function of their site is not necessarily social networking. (hmm… think Google knows about Beacon?)