A9/Amazon is sporting a new Yellow Pages feature, whose claim to fame is its use of photos...

Palo Alto-based A9 said it compiled the index by covering tens of thousands of miles in trucks equipped with digital cameras and global positioning system, or GPS, receivers.

Bistro Elan is exactly the kind of business you would want photos for. They have no conspicuous sign, and are nearly hidden by vines. But a search on Palo Alto showed "Bistro Elan" as a listing, and when I clicked it I got this.

Can you imagine showing up at these people's house?

"Hi, reservation for six!"

The real Bistro Elan, shown here (I took pictures up and down California Avenue to kill time while Philippe made copies in Kinko's.) Have fun comparing the real photos with the ones Amazon is currently showing. I'm sure this is a temporary issue, but it's been temporarily wrong all weekend. And with the extensive news coverage, I'm sure I'm not the only one to spot issues. Is this really how they want to launch a ground-breaking feature that introduces their customers to a new body of competency? Hopefully no one is really using it yet.

As an aside, Bistro Elan is a terrific place to eat. One of the best in Palo Alto, IMO.

They had Clement Street in San Francisco right. Their interface needs a ton of work as I could not click on a picture to have it tell
me what it may be or list businesses that may be on that side of the street. It bugs me that it is sitting on top of Yellow Pages as my
cultural language does not mesh easily with the ones in the Yellow Pages. I love the internet as I thought I would never have to interface
with another Yellow Page book and now this. Arg! If they adjust the perspective away from the Yellow pages and focus on the person and interacting with the pictures this will be killer. Now it is just cool,
but very buggy.

The Nut! used to love the fact that they let people smoke in their, to hell with the no-smoking laws, LoL...

Hey - did you know you can submit your own photos to a9 if you think
they are better... wouldn't it be cool if you got some benefit back for
that - e.g. affiliate moolah, or geopositioning reciprocal tags for the
same pictrue on your flickr.

yet all you get is a legal notice telling you you have lost control
over the pictures forever, and they can use them how they see fit
(though admittedly it is non-exclusive). I went through the pain of
uploading one before the effort/reward ratio stopped me.

Now when they let us link in flickr, we'll talk. ;-)

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