The same problems that plagued 1.0 resources like phone books and encyclopedias still plague even the best of their 2.0 successors. These legacy issues mainly regard reliability as it pertains to accuracy. After a phone book is published and distributed, it is instantly out-of-date as phone numbers are disconnected and addresses changed. Unfortunately, this is an issue developers have yet to circumvent.

As documented in The New York Times’ article about Urbanspoons, a free Apple iPhone application that helps users “find restaurants by neighborhood, cuisine or price,” reality may be quite different from what Urbanspoons tells you. The writer’s Urbanspoons search led him to a restaurant that had been closed for six months, yet it still appeared highly recommended in the application. Inconvenient at worst, Urbanspoons’ inaccuracy is easily forgotten over a glass of wine at a restaurant that is actually still open for business.

On a more sinister level, outdated materials can be damaging to one’s (or one’s neighborhood, and by extension, their property value) reputation. Take, for example, rottenneighbor.com, “the first real estate search engine of its kind allowing you to rate and review good and bad neighbors before and after you move so you can make a smart real estate decision.” From the get-go, many users walk a fine line between honest, albeit negative, reviews and pure defamation. So what happens to reviews of neighbors after they move? The reviews stay with the location, so the new neighbor moving in will turn up in a search as a bad neighbor. And some of these reviews are quite unsavory, think “cat killer.” In a search of my neighborhood, I found a review of a man who was a resident of an apartment in 1999. While it is highly unlikely either party still lives in the building, the building will turn up, nine years later, as the home of a “freaky porn addict and nudist.”

Users of online directory resources should beware of outdated reviews and content. It’s common sense, but that shiny new iPhone may cloud better judgment.  In the meantime, I will continue posting reviews of all of my least favorite neighbors and take reviews of others with a grain of salt. You never know, they may or may not still be there.