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Yelp, the hive of entitled creeps, "elite" monsters and extortionate salesmen, filed to IPO at up to $2 billion valuation, four times what Google once offered. If people keep occupying Wall Street forever, maybe this unprofitable company/monster will just die. More »
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If you updated your iPhone Yelp app today, you may have noticed that the popular consumer review network has done away with three kinds of bugs. Let's see now — there's the bookmarks bugs, the layout bugs, and the...uh...EPA bugs? No, wait darn it, that's not it. Can someone help them out here? Anyone? Man, they really stepped in it this time. [Yelp] More »
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The Senate is about to debate whether Google is evil. The search giant's competitors, including Yelp, have come out swinging, and they seem to have a good case. More »
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Yelp: Full of altruistic, food-loving people who get a kick out of highlighting restaurants they love, right? Wrong. The "Yelp Mafia" is a violent ravenous mob, bound by a shadowy covenant whose only condition is power—and free food. More »
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The "Abortionplex" — that flight of Onion fancy that some think is real — has a Yelp page that's racked up a slew of satisfied user reviews. Next up: the CGI animated family feature. Get to work, Hollywood! [BoingBoing] More »
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A tipster forwards us a totally insane email sent to New York City's Elite Yelpers - the frequent reviewers Yelp invites to special, free events (all of whom, it should be noted, must be at least 21 years old). It seems a Yelp staffer witnessed "absolute, abject terror in the eyes of a waiter" at a recent event who was "traumatized by the rabid ferocity with which certain guests attacked his plate of hors d'oeuvres." More »
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Yelp, the unqualified-schmoes-reviewing-restaurants site, has added "hipster" as an official category when describing an establishment's ambiance. It joins established selections such as romantic, trendy, intimate, casual, classy, and touristy. More »
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Whatever you do, don't talk trash about Yelp users. If you do—like Denver chef Scott Parker recently did—then they'll do one of two things: More »
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What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Unless what happens in Vegas is that a glass-encased, concave hotel creates a "death ray" of concentrated sunlight and burns a guest. This is something everyone should know about. More »
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A French tourist slipped off the edge of the Grand Canyon while taking pictures and fell 75 feet. But he survived! Now he has a great story to tell, and "Falling Into the Grand Canyon" has a Yelp review. [AP] More »
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A skanky mannequin has been discovered in the San Francisco headquarters of Yelp. The doll is supposed to represent a Yelp user, but she also makes the perfect mascot for the self-consciously trashy local ratings site itself. More »
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Facebook had its third alarming bug in as many weeks, when a security researcher showed how a hostile website could obtain your Facebook information via Yelp. The hole is supposedly fixed, but then so were the prior two. More »
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Zagat's strategy for its losing battle against foodie blogs and user-generated restaurant review sites: Claiming to be kindreds. Nina Zagat says the Zagat Survey was crowd-sourcing before it was cool. Yelp : Zagat :: Charles Darwin :: Alfred Wallace Russel. Who? Exactly. [HuffPo] More »
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Yelp has surrendered. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman announced his local-reviews site will stop selling merchants the ability to select "favorite reviews," which push negative feedback further down profile pages. So now how will Yelp make money? More »
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Welcome to the ultimate distillation of all the most evil social networking practices to have emerged over the past couple of years: Unvarnished, a website where complete strangers can set up your "profile" and mock you before potential employers. More »
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With the other Elevation Partners, singer Bono invested in Palm, an analyst dartboard; Yelp, a class-action magnet; and Forbes and Move.com, both financially bulldozed. He might be our "worst investor," but Bono's financial blues album should be a hit. More »
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The last thing Yelp needs right now is a public imbroglio with an upset internet luminary. But the local-reviews website sure has one, on top of many new lawsuits from merchants and an embarrassing tiff with Google. More »
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A Long Beach, Calif., veterinarian has filed a federal class-action complaint against the online-review site Yelp, claiming it's a shakedown operation that will remove negative consumer reviews for cash. More »
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The hottest fantasy in Silicon Valley involves a big, hot... tech bubble. Facebook and Yelp supposedly want one, so they can IPO in 2010; even Penthouse publisher FriendFinder Networks wants to go public, despite a sex harassment scandal. More »
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There's some amusing finger-pointing going on in the aftermath of the Google-Yelp affair (which, like any affair, may just be in remission). More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5432541&view=rss&microfeed=true • Diane Sawyer's World News debut lifted the newscast's ratings a bit. [LAT] More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=508338&view=rss&microfeed=true • Diane Sawyer made her debut this evening as anchor of ABC's World News; Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the night's big attraction. [AP] More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=508320&view=rss&microfeed=true Local review repository Yelp walked away from Google's $550 million acquisition offer this weekend. [TechCrunch] More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5431188&view=rss&microfeed=true • Charlie Gibson signed off as anchor of World News for the last time tonight. He's bidding goodbye to ABC News after a 34-year run. [ABC News, AP] More »
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Google is more likely than not to buy Yelp, say news reports. Which raises one glaringly obvious question: Will Google exacerbate or correct the local review site's worst tendencies, which have brought extortion allegations, porny bacchanals and physical violence? More »
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At Yelp, every review is a chance for free drinks, every email a chance for distasteful punning — and every company party a chance to leer, spank and orgy out. Judging from the pictures, 2009's holiday bash was no exception. More »
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Yelp couldn't have guessed one of its reviewers might end up in a vicious wrestling match with a store owner, right? Wrong: the owner had visited Yelp HQ the day before the fight, been ignored, then turned away. More »
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The Yelp reviewer supposedly attacked by a store owner just got a zero-star rating for honesty. The store owner says it was the reviewer who attacked, even though the owner came in peace to apologize. More »
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To hear Yelp reviewer "Sean C." tell it, San Francisco's Ocean Avenue Books really didn't appreciate his pan of the "TOTAL MESS" of a store: The owner somehow found his home, he said, and tried to force her way in. More »
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Reviewers on Yelp aren't very discerning: They award four or five stars 69 percent of the time (see chart). The local ratings website could combat this by grading on the curve, but would rather force you to click around. More »
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The Web was supposed to disintermediate business, replacing corruptible middlemen with accurate information fed directly to consumers. But judging from the restaurant industry's experience, it may have just made corruption more widespread and louche. Just look at this receipt: More »
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Whoops: Yelp signed up "SF Women Against Rape" as a sponsor of its email newsletter, then ran their ad under an insinuating headline about bicycles that read, "Put the Fun Between Your Legs." Cue the outrage! More »
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The Nob Hill Gazette, a San Francisco "society" publication, has come up with a list of area eligibles, including a wife beater and more than one gay man. Hard to be a straight woman here! More »
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Celebrity chef Thomas Keller will not deign to acknowledge the existence of Yelp. But the New York Times has. While individual writeups on the user-written restaurant-reviews site may be goofy, biased, or contrafactual, on the whole they give potential diners a good idea of what to expect. And they are vastly more prolific than the pros: Megan Cress, a Yelper, has written 300 restaurant reviews in three years. Times critics take twice as long. We wonder: Did the editors think the beancounters who are eyeing the Times's dwindling cash balance wouldn't read this article? (Illustration by John Hersey/New York Times) More »
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A report from The Register claims that five business owners have complained to them that Yelp salespeople offered to "push bad reviews to the bottom" in exchange for an ad buy on the site. The story, based partly on several unnamed sources, leaves me skeptical. None of the sources claimed Yelp actually did move negative reviews out of sight after they'd bought a sponsored link. That backs CEO Jeremy Stoppelman's claim that they were probably duped by a "rogue salesman." But the article makes it easy to understand why people would pay up: The business owners who talked to The Reg in exchange for anonymity come across as more afraid of retaliation from Yelp commenters than from Yelp lawyers. More »
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The email-newsletter headline had my business-minded editor all hot and bothered: "Yelp Goes to Google!" But no, this wasn't an oh-so-logical tuck-in acquisition of the local reviews site by the search giant. Instead, it was a sitdown with Marissa Mayer. In the interview, Mayer reveals her usual spreadsheet array of girly affectations: cupcakes! Manolos! highlights! I'm miffed about the highlights, because we have the same stylist, and as Mayer gushes like the best ladymag ingenue, "I hesitate to even say anything because she's so good and I'd hate for it to be harder for me to get an appointment." Still, cute to see her getting cozy with the review website, since if Google did take the plunge and acquire Yelp, it'd be Mayer, VP of Stuff People Actually Use, who'd make the call. More »
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If TheEroticReview.com is "Amazon.com for prostitutes" (as dubbed by Matt Richtel in the New York Times), do customers get "free delivery for orders over $100", asks Salon.com's Broadsheet. We agree with Salon's assessment — TER is really more like Yelp — unless there's some exciting new feature to Amazon Prime that the Times was briefed on under embargo. More »
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Social reviews site Yelp isn't nearly as popular in New York as it is in San Francisco and management has been planning to do something about it. "They're gonna pump up efforts to conquer NYC, renting an office in Gramercy area and assign [an] East Coast community leader," a source with new details tells us. Yelp already has an ad sales office in New York's West Village, but our source says those people will move to the larger office further uptown by September as well. Yelp is a cousin to widgetmaker Slide, with Slide founder Max Levchin on Yelp's board. With Slide's own upcoming move to New York and Yelp's city expansion, we'd expect to see a lot more Levchin around the Alley, except, well, we hear he never leaves the office. (And if he did, we'd prefer he say hello to his bride to be first.) More »
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What if Facebook let you properly express your rage against the tool who just added you to the "Buying and Selling Friends" app? What if Netflix knew you'd skip to the dirty bits? I paid Jay Hathaway a slave's wage to draw up what this would look like. More »
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