“Finding a good and trustworthy plumber and electrician is getting too hard these days,” my father said to my mother a few days ago.
“Oh, really?” she said, “Just try and find a good and trustworthy maidservant and you’d know what hard is!”
Well, I don’t know if Toost can yet help and find a good maid. But if you are looking for a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter or any other local business like an eatery, a hotel, a medical specialist, Toost might be able to help you out by making available community powered recommendations.
Toost is Phone Warrior’s local search mobile app, It has been designed to help users discover local small business. When a user performs a search on this app, for example for a carpenter, the results show all the carpenters that the app can find in the area and gives details about their name, contact details, address, distance from the user.
One can create a user profile on the app by registering one’s phone number. That is, I guess, how the app builds up its database.
When I tried the app, I did not register and chose to hit the small LATER button to delay the registration. I could still use the app to perform any search. However, I found very few businesses close to my home and most of the result were of distant locations. I suppose that problem would get sorted out as the Toost gathers information about more small business.
The app also allows its users to invite their friends to the app and also has a Feeds page on which one can see the activity of all Toost users or optionally only of the Friends. The app allows users to rate and review the professionals and these reviews and rating can be seen in the activity feed and also on the details page of that professional.
The app also allows users to ask their friends for recommendations.
Toost also has Caller ID and call blocking features that can give useful information about callers and can help one control spam calls. This feature automatically scanned through my call log when I first used this app and identified three unknown numbers. Two of these were spam callers. This feature makes the app feels a little like the Trucaller app.
Now, the thing is, as popular as trucaller is, I don’t like it. I know that the results it gives is because of all the data that has been collected from the contact lists of all its users (Check this review of Truecaller on gshrey.in). All the data that is being stored in some distant servers and can be used for whatever purposes. And not just contact list, but call log is also accessed and can be stored and retrieved at will. That is how the database that these apps use gets built.
I don’t really like this ‘community contribution model.’ And so, I do not use Truecaller on my phone. And when Toost started scanning my call log and telling me names of the unidentified callers, I decided I do not want to register my number in it. And I did not.Although, since it had already scanned through my contact list, I guess my purpose was already lost.
