I'm sure given AT&T's laudable history of building huge-scale, world-class websites and their sterling reputation for dealing with customers in a human fashion this site will do excellently.
I agree with the fact that this is doomed to fail.
AT&T does own Yellow Pages and they do have a head start in that regard.
Wasn't there a story about Yelp being lousy for business owners on HN active list the last few days?
I don't understand this logic at all. Twitter has learned so much by launching as early as they did, and now it's a huge success. It's better to "scale and stop falling over" while you're improving your product and growing exponentially than spend a year and a half having meetings.
buzz.com is a really good domain name for something like this, but I can't think of a single instance where a Fortune 500 company tried to build a strong community and succeeded.
"The site, which is in an invitation-only "alpha" testing phase, is geared toward helping people ferret out the best local businesses using recommendations from friends and family."
This has massive fail written all over it if they don't allow users to speak their mind.
If they would really give this a fair shot with their resources they could really make something of it. I'd love to give this a shot if they did this as a skunkworks project rather than their generally top down approach.