KZBlog

Chris Merriman has up a link to a great resource: Tomato, which is a Kazakhstan-based review site for businesses.

A little like Yelp for Kazakhstan, Pomidor (which means “tomato” in Russian) lets people put up reviews and stories of their experiences at different businesses in Kazakhstan. It needs a little more work–be nice to have a rating system and a more advanced navigation system to find businesses more accurately. It would also be good to have author profiles. At some point, the businesses themselves will notice this site (if they haven’t already) and start putting up fake positive reviews.But since Kazakhstan doesn’t really have a Yellow Pages and most businesses don’t have a strong web presence or freely available information, this site is very much needed here.

There’s already a lot of content, and it covers everything from restaurants and cafes, to furniture stores, to banks and telephone companies, to companies that offer Santa Claus actors for parties!

I certainly will try to find some time to put up a few good and bad reviews. I should note that the site is in Russian, and I assume they would expect reviews to be in Russian as well. Maybe the expat community should organize an English-language review site from the perspective of foreigners.