The Social

User-generated business reviews site Yelp has officially launched a U.K. edition, meaning that no business in England, Scotland, or Wales is safe any longer from the wrath of notoriously opinionated Yelpers.

Yelp had already gained a following in the U.K., the company said, because travelers bound for the U.S. use it to look up hotels, restaurants, bars, and the like. More than 100,000 of its visitors in the past month came from the U.K.

San Francisco-based Yelp, which accepts reviews of any business in the U.S. but also clusters businesses into subdirectories by city, quietly expanded to Canada several months ago. The company raised a fresh $15 million in funding early last year.

But the site's free-for-all, say-what-you-want nature may be under scrutiny: a Yelp reviewer was recently sued over a negative review of a chiropractor. If the lawsuit is successful, Yelp may have to crack down on particularly colorful reviews -- the content that has made it stand out from other business reviews sites.

A British woman has reportedly been kicked off a jury for posting a "note" on Facebook asking her friends what they thought of the trial.

She was given the boot after the court received a tip about the posting.

The original source of the story is the U.K. tabloid The Sun, which is better known for trashy stories about Prince Harry's partying habits than for sound news about social networking.

Regardless, spilling court case details on the Web certainly sounds like pretty good grounds for getting the boot.

The Sun explains: "It was thought she did not use privacy settings, meaning the Facebook posts could be read by anyone." Well, not quite. You need to be logged into Facebook in order to read anything on the site, something that occasionally gets on the nerves of the "open Web" crowd. But if the juror had no friends-only settings in place, the note could still have been pretty public.

The woman's name has not been released, but the court appears to have been Burnley Crown Court in Lancastershire, and the case involved child abduction and sexual assault. According to The Sun, the woman posted details of the case on Facebook and added, "I don't know which way to go, so I'm holding a poll." Yeah, that's bad.

The trial is said to have continued with 11 jurors instead of 12.

European users of Twitter can no longer receive text message updates on their cell phones, in a temporary move designed to keep the start-up's telecom bills down.

Twitterers can still use its U.K. number, +44 762 480 1423, to send updates to the site. But that number will no longer deliver text-message updates back to users, and recommends that they use the Twitter mobile site or a third-party client like TwitterBerry, Twitterrific, TwitterMail, or Cellity.

"When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to ten followers, you aren't charged ten times--that's because we've been footing the bill," a post on Twitter's blog explained. "When we launched our free SMS service to the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in popularity, so too would the price."

The company has managed to find "sustainable" text-message billing agreements in the U.S., Canada, and India--the other three countries in which Twitter has enabled SMS updates--so those countries will not be affected by the change. The blog post explained that Twitter is continuing to negotiate with mobile operators to make it possible for SMS numbers to exist around the world, but hasn't gotten there yet.

"Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the U.S.," the post explained. "It makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users."

When Glam Media raised $84.6 million in February, international expansion was on its radar, and now we're seeing the results: the women's-focused ad network announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Monetise, a London-based digital-ad sales start-up.

(Yes, that's British spelling.)

All Monetise employees will become part of Glam under the deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed.

"The acquisition of Monetise speeds our entry into the important U.K. display ad market," Glam Chairman and CEO Samir Arora said in a release. "Monetise has strong relationships with London advertising agencies and enables Glam to immediately increase its reach in the U.K. market." Additionally, some of Monetise's in-house technology will be worked into Glam's platform.

The 3-year-old Monetise, which specializes in entertainment advertising, serves display ads on sites such as Flixster, ArtistDirect and the U.K.'s TV Guide. Those sites will become part of Glam's U.K. Entertainment division; Monetise co-founder and CEO Joel Cymberg has been appointed Glam's publisher management and operations director, and co-founder and sales director Jon Walsh is now Glam's entertainment sales director.

In recent months, Glam has acquired fashion social network StyleMob, launched a revenue-sharing video platform, and become the subject of a quintessentially Silicon Valley hot-air debate over whether it had really gotten a billion-dollar acquisition offer.

News Corp.'s MySpace and Viacom's MTV are partnering again, and this time it's on a weekly TV show. But the program, a countdown show called MySpace Chart, will only air on the U.K. network MTV Two (the equivalent of the U.S. MTV2 channel) and there are no plans yet to bring the show stateside, an MTV Networks representative told CNET News.com.

Members of the social network, which initially gained traction as a way for independent music artists to gain buzz, will vote on select music videos each week that will then be showcased in the hour-long MTV Two show. MySpace Chart premieres on the evening of March 16; a week earlier, pages on MySpace and MTV Two will go live to kick off voting.

MTV parent company Viacom does have its own social-networking project, the "distributed" service called Flux. But partnering with MySpace can give them access to the massive site's audience. "The audience for MTV Two and MySpace are incredibly similar," Philip O'Ferrall, vice president of digital media for MTV Networks' U.K. and Ireland region, said in a statement. "Not only are they both incredibly passionate about their music tastes but they are powerful advocates for the latest upcoming artists, which both MTV and MySpace have a history of showcasing."

Additionally, for MTV, it's a way to bolster the company's new-media credibility; for MySpace, it helps to solidify its role as a pop-culture hub as the market for social networking grows increasingly crowded. In the U.K., MySpace not only competes with Facebook but also with the more youth-oriented Bebo--which syndicates some MTV video content as part of its "Open Media" platform.

MySpace's U.K. arm already had collaborated with MTV in order to find a new anchor for its MTV News show. In the U.S., the two partnered for a series of "presidential dialogue" events leading up to the Super Tuesday primaries.

Her Royal Highness will pwn your sorry hide!

(Credit: Official Royal Images Library)

Here in the U.S., our head of state couldn't seem to master the Segway, but Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is apparently quite the video game diva.

The undoubtedly reputable U.K. publication The People reported earlier this week that the 81-year-old royal got a hold of a Wii console (according to a "Palace source," it belongs to her 25-year-old grandson, Prince William) and "showed all the signs of becoming a Nintendo addict."

The Queen's game of choice seems to be Wii Bowling (what, did you expect Call of Duty 3?) and the source told The People that her "hand-eye coordination was as good as somebody half her age."

Prince William, meanwhile, "was in fits of laughter," but allegedly will have a tough time prying the console away from his grandmother. She is, The People notes, an unusually tech-savvy dame. She has reportedly had a cell phone since 2001, a BlackBerry since last year, and listens to an iPod regularly. (The People reports that it contains over 100,000 songs, which means that Steve Jobs must have custom-made it for her since the 160GB version holds only 40,000 songs, tops. Hey, Brits, do some fact-checking!)

And we here at CNET suppose it's good that Her Majesty is raiding Prince William's video game library rather than Prince Harry's liquor cabinet.

We all have complaints about the people we love and live with, but typically they don't turn into book deals. But Zoe McCarthy (no relation to this reporter), a 44-year-old British woman who gained cult fame for operating a blog called "My Boyfriend is a Twat," has recently cashed in on her significant other's tics and quirks. McCarthy, according to the U.K.'s Observer, has received about a $10,000 advance from Web-to-print publisher The Friday Project to turn her blog into a book. Not quite a Harry Potter-worthy figure, but nothing to scoff at, either.

A twice-divorced office manager with three teenage children, McCarthy describes her blog as "an affectionate guide to spotting, dealing and living with a twat, aka the average English bloke." It's built up quite the following of readers and has won the Best European Weblog category in the user-picked "Bloggies" award for three years running.

The blog reads like a characteristically British domestic comedy: "The Twat is trying to lose weight--something he really needs to do and so has given up wine until his birthday in mid-October," McCarthy wrote on August 14, for example. "This is all very well, but his stable diet as of now is either pasta with pesto sauce or a salad (yes, green food) which takes him forever to finish."

But before you come to the conclusion that this will certainly erupt in scandal, it turns out that the "twat" in question, 44-year-old Andy Carling, is well aware of the blog and actually "says he is delighted" by the book deal, according to the Observer. In fact, he was the one who dared her to start writing "My Boyfriend is a Twat" in the first place. Carling and McCarthy reportedly met in 2001, and McCarthy has been operating the blog for four of the following years, so it doesn't appear to have hurt the relationship whatsoever.

(Credit: ComScore)

Some interesting ComScore numbers have just been documented by CNET's sister site ZDNet: social-networking site Bebo, always more of a presence in the U.K. than stateside, has soared ahead of global leader MySpace on its home turf. In the month of July, the ComScore statistics say, Bebo logged 10.7 million unique visitors in the U.K. and MySpace trailed with 10.1.

This marks the first time that ComScore's statistics have shown Bebo ahead of MySpace. And it should be noted that these pertain to unique visitors, not registered users or page views.

In third place, not to be discounted, is Facebook with 7.6 million unique visitors in the U.K. in July. The formerly college-based "social utility" has been gaining speed abroad as well as in the U.S., and London has recently surpassed Toronto as its largest regional network.