The local reviews portal uploaded a cache of party pics to Flickr, a trove duly uncovered by Nicholas Carlson over at Silicon Alley Insider. It comes complete with the requisite provocatively posed women, mostly-naked men and naughty company icon (Santa). Those are the sort of party props that have become Yelp's PR calling card, lending the company a "let the good times roll" vibe that helps keep unpaid contributors supplying the company with free content.

In fact, this particular gathering, trampy as it may have been, looks reasonably tame compared to the debaucheries of years past; our last picture in the gallery below is a compilation distilling the positively fleshy feel of parties past (also documented here, here, here, here, here and here.)

UPDATE: It should be noted that this particular party was in San Diego; San Francisco-based Yelp will no doubt throw something similar in the Bay Area if it hasn't already (we hear it hasn't, yet, this year).

"That would be a lump of coal you're feeling, young lady, for your, uh, untoward extreme naughtiness. You're a very, uh, baaad girl."

Don't you wish you'd had the chance to sign this little angel, too??

Girl on far left rocking about 8x harder than everyone else in the picture.

"I can't speak for Mr. Leprechaun here, but I'm totally looking you in the eyes, lady."

Yelp photographers can literally smell the female tongue leaving the mouth.

"So many bad girls at this party, so little time to admonish them..."

Come, now, sir, you can do several buttons better than this. Several flies, even.

Ooops, we did it again, and, what do you know, at another Yelp party.

Santa presumably has his own private collection of these "girls on my lap" shots.

Everyone looks equally buzzed/sober. Nice pacing!

History teaches us what a truly wild Yelp party looks like.

Lawless, teen-heavy MySpace used to be considered the online place for pervs — Saturday Night Live even made a funny skit about it (embedded below). No more: Numbers published in the New York Daily News reveal that Facebook is the favored destination, attracting 79 percent of the registered sex offenders who declared accounts at the big social networks, versus 51 percent for MySpace. The numbers don't add up to 100 because many offenders had accounts on both networks; see the chart we made above for a different slice, or look at the precise the numerical breakdown in the image below.

The migration of these unsavories onto Facebook was inevitabe, particularly after Facebook relaxed its requirement that its members be in college or be college alumni. People want to join the social network everyone else is joining. Sex offenders are definitely no exception.

[via Wired Epicenter]

The spring makeover, an awkward attempt to ape Twitter, overwhelmed Facebook users with excess information. Over the summer, Facebook tested a stripped-down "LIte" interface that pulled back much of the clutter. Now, there's a new design previewed in PCinpact.com that, as noted by Business Insider's Alaska Miller, consolidates the chat-and-notification-toolbar at the bottom of the current Facebook homepage with the search bar and account links at the top. In other words, continues the quest for the sort of simplicity Facebook used to have.

Before:

After (click to enlarge) (via):

(Top pic: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by Mathieu Thouvenin)

The suit was probably inevitable. As we first reported, the Sacramento-based firm of Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff has been looking for victims of scammy ads in games like Mafia Wars and Farmville to potentially file a class action suit. Less than a week later, the firm's suit has hit federal district court in Northern California.

You can read the initial complaint in full here.

Neither gaming startup Zynga nor social network Facebook actually originates the advertisements in question; instead, other companies take out ads in Zynga's games, which run on Facebook's network, and the two companies make reportedly large sums of money from the offers. Some of the ads trick users into signing up for unauthorized cell phone charges or expensive mail-order products like educational CDs, typically by disguising them as "free" offers or "free trials," or as part of an "online quiz." TechCrunch has run an aggressive series of articles, cataloged at the bottom of this post.

Zynga reportedly takes in close to one-third of its revenue from "commercial offers" like those, and Facebook does well too, as KC&R lawyers point out in their complaint. An excerpt (click to enlarge):

Swift's attorneys also point to Zynga CEO Mark Pincus' damning video confession that "I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues" in their complaint, indicating it will be a significant piece of courtroom evidence, just as we predicted.

The prospect of being on the hook for massive damages has to make both Zynga and Facebook's investors sweat. Facebook is the darling of Silicon Valley, with VCs having valued it in the billions of dollars, while Zynga counts the elite firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers among its major investors. Yet both companies have come to rely on greasy advertisers for much of their revenue; in addition to the game-ad scammers, Facebook is also sells ad to marketers who resort to tactics like using stolen pictures of apparent underaged girls to promote their products. If the company's are found to be liable of helping con customers by working with these sorts of slimeballs, it's hard to say where the payouts might end.

Below, an excerpt of the scams allegedly perpetrated on the lead plaintiff in the case, Rebecca Swift.

(Top pic: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by Raphaël Labbé)

[Full court filing]

TechCrunch publisher Mike Arrington began writing his high-profile posts exposing the misleading ads carried by Zynga on October 31. Four days later, according to documents filed with the SEC yesterday, Zynga began issuing shares as part of its latest $15 million round of financing that included firms like the gold-standard Silicon Valley shop Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (past investments: Google, Amazon, Netscape, etc.), as PaidContent points out.

Of course, it took until Nov. 6 for video to emerge of Zynga CEO Mark Pincus admitting that some of the ads his company ran were "horrible." But we'd venture to guess that Zynga's investors, now into the startup for at least $54 million, would still have gone forward with their investment even that video emerged earlier. They care no more about Zynga's murky origins than they did about those of Zynga's chief clients like MySpace (born from a spam and spyware operation) and Facebook (which paid $65 million to settle claims it was founded on stolen technology). In Silicon Valley, the sins of the past are regularly washed away by infinite promise of the all-important future.

(Pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, by Joi Ito)

Amid withering press from TechCrunch and other outlets, the Zynga CEO has finally removed scammy commercial offers from his company's online games, like Mafia Wars and Farmville. That's nice. But maybe the whole scandal could have been avoided if he'd taken a less skeptical take on his Harvard Business School ethics class. From his 2006 blog post about the class:

The school had this bullshit 3 week class called 'ethics' which we all took together at the outset of the program - guess it was to make sure we all had at least heard the term a few times and might feel more comfortable even using it...

Pincus goes on to tell how his amoral, investment-banker classmates defended a banker who left a sick Indian man behind to die in order to finish climbing a Himalayan mountain the banker had long wanted to conquer. Pincus accused his classmates of moral bankruptcy and became a black sheep, he says.

He was also aghast when a fellow student got off with a slap on the wrist after he was caught stuffing the ballot box in an election to head the school's Finance Club. Pincus thought he would be expelled or at least suspended for a year.

I'd soo love to know where that kid's career went and what he's doing today. He must be a major leader as he soo gets our system.

Pincus ended his blog post on an optimistic, pro-ethics note, saying that "this century's newest success stories" like Google, Bill Gates and eBay "are about authentic people taking responsibility and serving all stakeholders," i.e. acting ethically, donating money to charity, etc. Despite this conclusion, Pincus soon found himself on a darker path; he was soon doing "every horrible thing in the book to... get revenues right away" at Zynga, he told fellow entrepreneurs at a mixer earlier this year.

Said mixer wasn't the first time Pincus gave up a sleazy vibe; check out the tweets below from entrepreneur and former Valleywagger Alaska Miller. Apparently Pincus' ethics were derailed some time after he wrote that "authentic people" are the bright future of American business. It's hard to know whether to the blame that stumble on Pincus' obvious cynicism toward his Harvard ethics class — or on his failure to cling to his cynical conclusions more tightly through the years.

(Top pic: Pincus, by Joi Ito)

Sacramento-based Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP is looking for people who faced "unauthorized charges imposed on Facebook and MySpace users who participate in social games like 'Farmville' and 'Mafia Wars.'" The firm, which said it has launched an investigation into such scams, specializes in class action suits, among other areas.

Mike Arrington's TechCrunch has posted a series of articles on the issue of sleazy revenue models for online games, exposing the practice of sneaking mobile data subscriptions and pricey "learning CD" packages past players trying to earn online "points." Mafia Wars and Farmville creator Zynga gets a third of its revenue from such "commercial offers," while Facebook in turn gets 10-20 percent of its money from Zynga, according to Arrington.

Zynga has yanked some of its ads; Facebook, in turn, has suspended one of Zynga's smaller games. But there's evidence this issue could have been addressed much sooner. TechCrunch found video (below) shot this past spring in which Zynga's CEO said he "did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away."

That sounded bad enough when it was reprinted on a tech blog; imagine how it's going to sound in court.

(Top pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, possibly calling his lawyer, by Joi Ito.)

Ocean Ave. Books proprietor Diane Goodman visited Yelp to try and get her private Yelp messages removed from a Yelp discussion forum. She had sent them to a reviewer named "Sean C.," calling him a "coward" and "pussy boy" over a review that called her shop a "TOTAL MESS." She quickly apologized for the messages, she has said, but was irked that they remained on Yelp's message boards (see Google's cache).

Last Friday, Oct. 30, after an unsuccessful phone call, Goodman obtained Yelp's SOMA address through the Better Business Bureau and went there to ask them to remove her messages. She found an office with no Yelp signage and with an apathetic staff:

After going over there and telling my sad story to a bunch of people sitting at a picnic table who were all talking about the parties and concerts they were about to attend that weekend, none of them offered to help me. I attempted to convey the seriousness of what was about to happen to me, but know[ing] I'm not a Yelp sponsor they only gave me blank looks and turned away.



I asked the security guard if I could go upstairs to talk to someone and she said No. She said I would have to leave now and I said OK peacefully and then she locked the security gate and I left.

Having gotten nowhere with Yelp, Goodman two days later tracked down Sean C. through some clues on his profile (being apparently quite good at finding "unlisted" addresses) and visited his house, sparking the violent confrontation. Sean C says Goodman tried to force his way in; Goodman has said she was initially invited in but that the reviewer freaked out and pushed her when she said she was visiting him about the Yelp review.

Goodman told us yesterday she visited the house to apologize — and perhaps to get Sean C. to remove her angry messages. "The real thing that upset me about the whole thing was that he made an irate message out of my emails and put them on Yelp," she said.

Yelp might have diffused the situation by offering Goodman more than blank stares and a cold shoulder during her visit. After all, the discussion thread Goodman wanted removed from Yelp's server was, in fact, eventually removed "as inappropriate." A five or ten minute conversation with a business owner (and potential advertiser) who had gone to the trouble of finding the company's address might have calmed Goodman down, and sped up a deletion that happened later anyway.

Look at the situation from Goodman's perspective: She's a bricks-and-mortar, face-to-face neighborhood merchant being pelted by faceless, nameless online entities (and one remote customer service rep on the phone), and no one will have an actual face to face conversation with her.

Goodman is also an aggressive business owner who has now been cited for battery, so Yelp has a ready-made excuse for not engaging with her. But our impression is that the company only likes getting face to face with the "local" market it purports to serve when it means collecting advertising money or guzzling free food and drink at one of its "Yelp Elite" bacchanals.

Speaking of which: We asked Yelp PR for comment on this incident two days ago and have yet to hear back.

(Pic: Yelp HQ, 2007, by evadedave on Flickr)

The Valley fad of social network games like Mafia Wars and Farmville disguise old-school scams, Mike Arrington has been demonstrating over at TechCrunch this weekend. High-revenue don of social networking games Zynga, which makes the aforementioned Mafia Wars and Farmville, gets one-third of its revenue from various shady "commercial offers" and lead-generation systems, Arrington reports. Here's how HotOrNot founder James Hong described the social networking cash scene in a TechCrunch comment:

The offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users.... i'm pretty sure most of the money ended up getting our users hooked into auto-recurring SMS subscriptions for horoscopes and stuff.

Examples, via TechCrunch:

• "Users are offered in-game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey... They are told their results will be text messaged to them... and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they've done that, they've just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription."
  
• "Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD... The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them."

There's an entire thriving "ecosystem" devoted to these sort of "deals," the sort of thing that in a different context might just be called a "crime ring." It's a profitable network, at least for the people at the top: Arrington estimates Facebook might be taking in $50 million per year from Zygna alone.

So, social networks are basically turning in to just another snakeoil sales channel in the mold of late-night 1-800 number commercials. Which sucks not only for the marks who've been duped but, ultimately, for Facebook's investors, since taking this sort of easy cash reduces internal pressure to come up with some sort of truly innovative revenue stream.

Not to mention what it does to user trust: Who's going to want to hand over their credit card information or even cell phone number to the likes of Facebook amid all these scams? (Answer: People who passed their "IQ test" with flying colors and a useless $10/month subscription.)

Yahoo had a shot at acquiring or investing in Google before purchasing Geocities; according to John Batelle's The Search, Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Yahoo in 1997 or 1998, but Yahoo passed. Page and Brin were becoming desperate for resources — they had scrounged far more than their fair share of excess servers, hard drives and bandwidth belonging to Stanford University — so on the advice of a professor they turned to Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim:

Brin sent Bechtolsheim an e-mail late one night requesting a sit-down, and Bechtolsheim answered immediately. He suggested meeting the next morning at eight o'clock... They agreed to meet, on the porch of [a mutual friend's] Palo Alto home...



[Page:] "We did a demo, and Andy asked a lot of questions. [Then] he said: 'Well, I don't want to waste time. I'm sure it'll help you guys if I just write a check.'"



...When Bechtolsheim went out to his car to get his checkbook, they pondered how much to ask for and at what valuation... "We told him our valuation and he said, 'Oh, I don't think that's enough, I think it should be twice that much...'"



Minutes later, Page and Brin had a check for $100,000.

This happened in late 1998, right around the time Yahoo would have been negotiating its Geocities boondoggle, which was consummated in January 1999. To think the company could have had Google for a song. Google users should be glad Yahoo didn't — Yahoo's bumbling managers probably would have run Google.com into the ground. Twitter investor Fred Wilson should be glad, too: the Geocities deal earned his venture capital firm a hundredfold return.

MySpace CEO and would-be savior Owen Van Natta, the studmuffin hired away from Facebook, told the Financial Times he's not gunning for his ex employer any more:

"Facebook is not our competition," he said. "We're very focused on a different space."

Van Natta added that MySpace it will focus on its strength: Music. MySpace has become the default Web host for independent rock bands, and recently purchased music software company iLike.

MySpace wasn't always so blasé about social networking, the company used to have Facebook in its sights. It was barely two years ago that Van Natta's predecessor Chris DeWolfe got an urgent phone call from Peter Chernin at MySpace's parent company saying, "I need a plan for dealing with Facebook in two weeks." This led, according Julia Angwin's book Stealing Myspace, to a strategy for dealing with "the Facebook challenge head on," presented at a Merrill Lynch conference.

"I realize every person in tis room wants to ask me about Facebook, and, frankly, I want to talk about Facebook," [Fox Interactive Media president Peter] Levinsohn said.

But these days MySpace has just one third of Facebook's users. No wonder the company is singing a different tune.

It's just not a well advised one. Instead of competing with a money-losing internet company headed by a twentysomething college dropout, MySpace will now be taking on Apple (cash hoard: $30 billion) and Google (annual profits: $5 billion, operator of YouTube and soon to be a retailer of MP3s). Sounds like a great plan.

Two years ago, the Times was quoting the same sort of fabulous young people saying that a different teeny-tiny social network, Harvey Weinstein's A Small World, was going to be the cool new thing. But traffic quickly flatlined, and Weinstein earlier this month finally relinquished his stake in the disappointing property.

Foursquare, admittedly, seems slightly more interesting: It has an innovative, GPS-based "check-in" technology that allows you to register your location; and like Twitter in its early days it has caught on among the hipster dot-com digerati. But its 60,000 users are nothing to brag about, and there are some interesting parallels between how it and A Small World were packaged in the Times:

Picture of worldly young women? Check.

• Foursqaure: "Emily Woolf, far right, uses, Foursquare.... to find her friends when she wants to meet."
  
• A Small World: "Laura Rubin, a brand consultant and fashion publicist.... combed [the site] for guests to attend a fashion party in the glass-enclosed penthouse of Hotel on Rivington on the Lower East Side."

• Foursquare: "Supersize services like Facebook and Twitter... have millions of members... [Foursquare] is not yet cluttered with celebrities, nosy mothers-in-law or annoying co-workers."
  
• A Small World: "Sleeker than MySpace or Facebook, aSmallWorld.net is not the type of site where one is likely to come across videos of amateur motorcycle stunts or girls in bikinis."

• Foursquare: "At this point, I don't even bother texting or calling my friends. I just check Foursquare to see if they're nearby and go meet them." —Emily Woolf, 24. "On Twitter, there are more than 3,000 people that follow me... Foursquare is more the people that I actually want to hang out with." —Annie Heckenberger, 36.
  
• A Small World: "In reply to a query from a comely young woman searching for a hairdresser in Singapore, a Procter & Gamble executive there responded with a thinly veiled proposition: 'I have two bottles of Nice n' Easy in the cupboard. I'll do it for free.'"

• Foursquare: "One factor that might help Foursquare retain its intimate feel is that most of its members... many urbanites in their 20s and 30s.... are picky about who can see the real-time footprints that they are leaving across the cities in which they live."
  
• A Small World: "The site functions much like an inscrutable co-op board: its members, who pay no fee, induct newcomers on the basis of education, profession and most important, their network of personal contacts."

Foursquare: Everyone goes there, because it's not crowded.

Weinstein Co. will offload its majority stake in ASmallWorld.net to mogul Patrick Liotard-Vogt, scion of the family that started Nestle Corp., sources tell the Times. There's no word on the price.

But there's every reason to think it will be depressed. A Small World was movie honcho Harvey Weinstein's first internet investment, and it soured quickly: Fully a year and a half ago, the VIP members were already complaining about emails pestering them to log on to the site and about the increased ads. Traffic has remained flat for years, while Facebook soared. The problem was fundamental: Rich guys don't want to socialize only with one another, and once you let in enough attractive young women and such your VIP site loses it cachet and everyone might as well just hang out on Facebook, which Metcalfe's law teaches us is exponentially more useful anyway.

Not that Weinstein suddenly realized any of this; he's cutting his losses only now that circumstances have forced him to, and probably at a fire-sale price. At least now he can focus on trying to save his flailing movie company. The members of a Small World have plenty of other ways to entertain themselves.

Gadget play is, after all, fun to engage in but excruciating to watch; we can't imagine Stewart's thousands of home viewers will enjoy watching a distracted crowd frantically fingering their BlackBerrys. Which means the flood of retweets and Tumblr postings Rachel Sklar predicts over at Mediaite might not do much for Stewart, since they'll be showcasing a below-par episode of her show.

Still, the exercise should be worthwhile, if only because the geek crowd can help the domestic media overlord increase the destructive powers of her Twitter feed, a dark vortex of explosions, fire and animal death.

The best part of Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree's software, created for a research project, is that you don't even need to "friend" your target to figure out if he's gay. You simply need access to his friends list, which is made public by default on Facebook. In the students' test, which examined 947 profiles, the program identified all 10 of 10 men the students knew to be gay, but who had not declared so on Facebook, according to a summary in the Boston Globe.

Studies following up on this crucial research will, presumably, deal with the problems of false positives and of lesbians, who somehow evade the gaydar completely. In the meantime, people can't stop talking about the MIT students' unreleased software. Because while sexual orientation has never been less of a secret, particularly among the young oversharers on Facebook and Twitter, users of these social networks love nothing so much as a little passive-aggressive e-stalking. Especially of the pseudo-scientific sort.

These heroes, known as the Facebook Five, made offensive comments about the prison boss for the Austalian state of New South Wales in a closed Facebook group, according to the AP. It's not clear how prison authorities came across the postings, but Facebook groups, even closed ones, can easily have hundreds of members. The workers, three men and two women, face possible dismissal over the messages for "unauthorized public comment" and "comment to the media without permission."

The employees argue their conduct was outside the workplace — i.e., on Facebook — and "intended" to be private. That standard would allow you to complain about your boss virtually anywhere on Facebook, save for his personal profile page. That sort of raw commentary might be hard for a supervisor to read, but that's the kind of unfiltered stuff she signed up for when she "friended" you, right?

(Image via)

Jesse Eisberg kinda works as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, we guess. But how about Michael Cera, instead? With some hair-curling he'd have the look down, and he could have used the role to break free from the "twee teenaged dork" typecast and into the much more interesting "Asperger-level-antisocial teenaged computer nerd" role.

That's Andrew Garfield, of Boy A, as spurned co-founder Eduardo Saverin.

Got a better casting idea? Post it in the comments.