It’s ridiculous to see things like this change so often. The process of writing a review should be easily accessible. I think if Google didn’t want anonymous users writing reviews, they should have stated and let that be right from the start. I think, however, it’s beneficial to link a profile with a review, just so we as consumers can verify that it’s a real person with a real review.

But with the new Google Places app that’s just been introduced, I think getting reviews and making sure your business is on the map is more important than ever.

when user click on rating stars, hotpot profile option pop in. under the new system . user must have hotpot profile to leave reviews . this is ridiculous why the heck they are making it complicated .

@Glocal
Yes and last week, it took users over there but not it just hangs…

@Plamen
It seemed that way when it was working but not that it isn’t it seems even stupider. 🙂

Google hasn’t performed as well as they did in search engine, there is much for her to learn from other companies, review system is just one example.

That’s absolute B.S.
Google is a multi-billion dollar company that makes a lot of money off us.
If any little web business issued products that didn’t get the fundamentals right, we’d scrap them and never visit them again saying they were ‘unprofessional’. Yet Google has this big business righteous attitude that they don’t care about the little people, as long as they make money. If they gave a damn, they would put live chat customer service calls all over their sites so we could talk to real people and report these bugs to get them fixed asap. But they don’t. They choose not to because they don’t give a damn. So enough people have to blog about it to get Google’s attention.

And don’t talk about ‘supporting data’ that’s crap. You don’t need a gazillion people to tell you IT’S NOT WORKING. I just tried it, and I can’t write reviews either, with the same problem. The onus is not on customers to proove to google it’s a massive problem and document it for them with qualification. You’re being ridiculous, and frankly I wouldn’t be suprised if you’re getting paid off by Google to monitor social media for them, because that author of this blog is spot on.

@Mike I just incredulously experienced this and found no help anywhere until I thought I’d check your blog and sure enough once again you have the answer. As a provider of Local SEO services it is extremely embarrassing to have to keep apologizing for Google’s horrible Google Places bugs and virtually zero customer support. I wholeheartedly agree that Google needs to figure out how important Local SEO and Google Places is, and put the resources into the product AND customer service. It is just crazy how poorly they are executing. When will someone over there “get it” and put the proper processes and human resources behind Google Places/Maps?