The Social

If Google's rumored $500m acquisition of Yelp goes through, the search giant may finally get a solid lock on the "hyperlocal" Web. But it'll also be acquiring a big community site--and those are notoriously hard to wrangle.

Restaurant industry blog Eater might have put it best: "One can only assume that with Google's muscle behind the site, the millions of users who log on to complain about restaurants would be able to say stupid stuff faster, and with more efficiency," editor Amanda Kludt wrote on Friday.

All snark aside, it's the same sort of issue that arose a few years ago amid persistent rumors that Google was going to acquire Digg, another site reliant on heavy participation from a loyal and extremely vocal community. The questions are more or less similar: What would Google change, and how much would they change it? Does Google's massive scope make it untrustworthy?

Yelp's official word: "Yelp is approached frequently by numerous entities to discuss partnerships, investments and more, and the company does not comment on private discussions that may occur."

Truth be told, the state of Yelp's forums on Friday indicated that many were more interested in talking about "Why are NYC apartment brokers such d-bags?" and "The official 'Jersey Shore' on MTV thread" than about whether Yelp might get sucked up by the Google monster. But a few threads did emerge, and the gist seems to be pretty much the same: They better not change too much. And please keep throwing parties.

"I wonder how this will effect Elite parties as well as Yelp Talk?" one Yelper asked in a Bay Area-centric thread about the acquisition. Another said, "So long as it's not Rupert Murdoch buying it." Some Yelpers were optimistic, suggesting that maybe there would be better integration with Google maps or additional technical improvements.

But others were concerned about quality control. "It means more trolls and fake reviews," one Yelper griped.

"Anyone ever look at the comments on YouTube videos?" another asked. "That is what is gonna happen here."

There were a few threats of account deletion, like "If this happens, I'm deleting my profile" and "Yelp is big because of us. Let's demand money or delete our accounts en masse." Generally, those aren't any real indicator of community revolt, but they're a reminder that it's extremely possible for a big buyer of a community site to mess things up big-time. LiveJournal users weren't thrilled about its Six Apart ownership, which ultimately failed. Likewise, when News Corp. acquired social network MySpace, mismanagement and a lack of innovation were likely what led to a drop in traffic and the eventual dominance of Facebook.

Worth a read: Yelpers' reviews of Google HQ in Mountain View, Calif. Choice bits range from "Google has lots of yummy, organic snacks and drinks" to "They have way too many skunks after 7 p.m. nightly and raccoons living on the Google campus."

This post was updated at 10:48 a.m. PT with comment from Yelp.

Wow. There is money out there: a retail deals site called Groupon has raised a whopping $30 million Series B funding round led by Accel Partners, one of Facebook's early backers. Existing Groupon investor NEA, which led the company's $4.8 million Series A round in January 2008, also contributed.

Here is the gist of Groupon: there are currently editions for 26 U.S. cities. The site advertises a deal each day from a selected local establishment like a restaurant, nail salon, or gym. There's a heavy discount involved. But enough members have to opt into the deal in order for any of them to get it. Groupon takes a cut of earnings if the deal hits the "tipping point" and goes live; otherwise, the featured merchant does not have to pay.

They've been profitable since June, founder and CEO Andrew Mason told CNET. So why raise $30 million? "We want to roll out to another 50 cities or so next year," he said, adding that early in 2010 it hopes to expand to Canadian cities, "so it's just going to help us increase the rate of customer acquisition and focus on building new technology." He wouldn't say what that new technology is, but he did add that the company went from 10 to 120 employees in the past year and planned to continue to grow at that rate.

The company grew out of an existing start-up called ThePoint, which applied a similar "collective" model to community and activism projects, before switching entirely to the retail model.

AOL CEO and former Google sales exec Tim Armstrong.

(Credit: Google)

We get it, Tim Armstrong. We know the still relatively new AOL CEO is all about reinventing the once-mighty online access company into a digital publishing powerhouse. But that didn't stop him from really hammering the point home at The Atlantic's First Draft of History conference on Thursday morning.

"What is the future of the company?" Armstrong, who previously served as a high-profile sales executive at Google, said in his talk, which was streamed live online. "If I had to describe it in one word, I think it's content, and I think it's content because there's an opportunity to marry what the content's already done with what the content can do."

One of his goals at AOL, he said, is to evolve and simplify the display advertising industry in a manner inspired by the success of search advertising. "When you have millions of advertisers that can sign up online in 10 minutes and run a global search campaign," he explained, "the same thing needs to be brought to display."

Armstrong has reason to believe in content. AOL acquired a solid portfolio of blogs when it purchased publishing network Weblogs Inc. in 2005, and the titles it's launched since then have largely been well-received--even though Armstrong promptly did away with the "MediaGlow" branding that had been established for the company's content division soon into his reign as CEO.

AOL has reach: 100 million visitors in the U.S., and 275 million globally. It'll soon be wholly independent from parent company Time Warner. Plus, the traditional print publishing industry is so beleaguered that it's about time a digital power stepped up to the plate.

But there are still plenty of issues at stake. Armstrong said that the ultimate answer to one of the biggest controversies in new-media publishing--do you charge for it or not?--will be that the Web will gravitate toward a mix of free, ad-supported content and paid offerings.

"I think consumers are smart. I think that if the content is really good, people will pay for it," he said. "I do think there's cases where I think if you can add enough value to content, people are going to pay for it. I think The Wall Street Journal's a good example of this."

Meanwhile, Armstrong expects the digital advertising industry to continue to mature, despite the fact that revenue has still been dampened by the recession. "When I came from Google to AOL the first meeting that I did was in Baltimore, at our Advertising.com (offices)," he related, referring to the ad network that AOL acquired in 2004. "One of the employees said, 'How many ad campaigns do you think we should be running?' and I said, I don't know, 500,000, and the audience went blank."

He continued, "The number was a few thousand, and for me that was shocking because I came from a place where we went from having a few hundred customers to having a million customers. And why hasn't AOL thought in that direction and that scale?"

Part of achieving that scale, he explained, involves getting pretty deep into local advertising markets, something that AOL sees as an untapped resource for both audiences and ad dollars. At the Atlantic event, he showed off some visuals from Patch, the local-news start-up that he invested in prior to his arrival at AOL; AOL ultimately acquired it. The start-up is currently restricted to about a dozen towns, mostly in New Jersey, but a gradual expansion is on the road map.

"In the town we're covering every single thing that a consumer in that town should be concerned about," Armstrong said of Patch, which employs a professional journalist in each town as well as aggregates local news from other sources. "The thing you don't see from the surface here is (that) we built a massive structured database underneath this. We've digitized the entire town."

A screenshot of the back-end dashboard of Citysourced, as displayed at TechCrunch50.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--It's about time people got excited over here.

It's not that the smattering of fresh new companies presenting at the annual TechCrunch50 start-up launch conference was boring, per se. Most of them, in fact, had an extremely practical slant to them, like the array of job- and car-hunting sites that take something Craigslist does and make it way less sketchy. And therein lies the problem: Sometimes, those sorts of productivity and next-gen enterprise start-ups simply aren't that cool and shiny when you stick them into a PowerPoint demo.

But it was on the morning of the second day of the conference that the judges, audience, and organizers seemed thoroughly impressed by an app that they could actually use. Meet Citysourced, a new iPhone app that lets the residents of an individual city log complaints and inquiries--graffiti, potholes, neighbors who go streaking--and send them straight to City Hall.

They had two announcements accompanying the launch: first, that Palm had made a research-and-development investment in Citysourced to build an app for the Pre handset; and second, that the city of San Jose, Calif., had signed on board to use Citysourced as its official mobile 311 system.

You might be thinking that this sounds familiar. That's because it's not the only player in the space: Open311 has gotten some buzz for applying the open-standards model to building civic feedback systems. Also, earlier this year the city of Boston commissioned a mobile development company called Connected Bits to build a complaint-filing app called Citizen Connect.

But none of the existing civic-engagement apps have caught on yet, and Citysourced's mix of no-brainer efficiency and easy-to-read maps seemed to impress both the judges and the audience. So did the back-end Web interface for mapping and tracking inquiries and complaints. Digg founder Kevin Rose, one of the judges, called it "an amazing idea" and started offering suggestions: he wanted to be able to subscribe to a feed of updates from his neighborhood, for example, as well as see volunteer opportunities and vote on the priority of issues, Digg-style.

Citysourced "just seems that it's one that's sort of a no-brainer," TechCrunch founder and conference organizer Michael Arrington said after the presentation, asking for a show of hands in the audience to see how many iPhone owners in the audience would want to download the app. Many arms were raised.

The challenge, as panel judge Tim O'Reilly pointed out, is that Citysourced can only beat its competitors if it has the best approach to the market, namely its effectiveness in getting new cities on board. The start-ups' executives said that they're already in talks with some more of the 10 biggest cities in the country and should have more announcements soon.

In either case, the laptop-wielding masses at TechCrunch50 seemed to think that this new mobile start-up is one to watch.

MySpace started off as a hub for indie bands to connect with their fans. Now, with a new partnership with the IAC/InterActiveCorp-owned Citysearch, it's hoping to do the same for the likes of bars, clubs, and restaurants.

Called "MySpace Local," the new section on the News Corp.-owned MySpace will be rooted in existing listings from Citysearch (restricted to major U.S. cities) that are souped up with social features like the ones that you might see on a band or celebrity's MySpace page (photos, videos, comments, and the like). It's launching with just "restaurants," "bars," and "nightlife" categories, but will eventually expand--and it'll only be available to a select number of users this week before rolling out to the rest of MySpace's U.S. users.

"We're using the tools of new media to make the discovery as social and therefore as relevant as possible," said Jeff Berman, president of sales and marketing at MySpace, in a conference call on Tuesday. "The first thing you will see are ratings and reviews from your actual friends. When a reviewer is anonymous or unknown, it's hard to say whether you should care what they think."

Eventually, MySpace Local will highlight reviews from celebrities, "influencers," and power users with "street cred." There will also be new features like menus and possibly an online reservation tool.

This move will put MySpace in competition with fast-growing reviews site Yelp, which has been dealing with image and credibility issues recently but which has nevertheless been catching up to Citysearch in reach.

It'll also present more opportunities for local advertising. The social network has been courting small advertisers with a program called MyAds. But there will be big brand advertisers on MySpace Local, too, with Outback Steakhouse and Coors signing on for the launch.

Citysearch, which recently overhauled its site, also syndicates some of its content to AOL.

Berman said that research showed about 50 percent of active Citysearch users have MySpace profiles that they check at least once a month. "There is healthy overlap, but there is also a healthy new audience to be reached," he said.

This post was expanded at 10:54 a.m. PDT.

Google Maps and Google Earth are the centerpiece of NYCGo, a new information and reference project launched by the New York City government to provide resources to both visitors and locals. Wednesday's launch announced the debut of NYCGo.com, a Google Maps-fueled local search and reference site, as well as the unveiling of the renovated New York City Information Center a few blocks north of the tourist-heavy Times Square district.

NYCGo.com contains not just Google map and search data, but also travel deals from Travelocity and local content from what-to-do powerhouse Time Out New York, nightlife culture magazine Paper, the New York Observer, and eco-living guide Greenopia.

The information center, located on Seventh Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets, is equally Googly. The city's technocratic mayor, Michael Bloomberg, even contributed a guest post to the official Google blog to announce it: "The Information Center features interactive map tables, powered by the Google Maps API for Flash, that let you navigate venues and attractions as well as create personalized itineraries, which can be printed, emailed or sent to mobile devices," the blog post explained. "Additionally, there's a gigantic video wall that utilizes Google Earth to display a 3D model of New York City on which you can map out personalized itineraries."

Bloomberg has been aggressive about promoting tech initiatives during his time in office, from a wind power plan (part of the much bigger "GreeNYC" project) and a city-run venture firm. Under his watch, the Mountain View, Calif.-based Google opened its New York satellite office, taking over several floors of the historic former Port Authority building downtown.

A side note: the video provided by Google shows the "interactive map tables" in the new information center, and they look a whole lot like Microsoft Surface units. But they aren't, a representative from NYCGo tells us. They're custom-made.

Is this a local news site or a celebrity gossip blog? I can't quite tell.

(Credit: AOL)

Maybe it's just because it's Monday morning and I've had only one cup of coffee, but I'm not quite comprehending DigitalCity.com, the latest in a parade of bloggy new sites from AOL.

A press release describes Digital City, which gets its name from a very vintage AOL brand, as "a new approach to geo-blogging by showcasing original content with a local slant, but global appeal." In other words, it's stuff about nightclubs in Vegas, concerts in Portland, and New York vs. Boston rivalries that are written so that you don't have to actually live in one of those cities to get what's going on. I suppose it's supposed to be in contrast to the insidery SFist or New York magazine--more like Gawker, which is New York-centric but pulls in traffic from around the world.

Unfortunately, it's disjointed, and that's something that advertisers, in addition to readers, will likely note. A post about great grilled cheese restaurants (one in Colorado, one in L.A.) precedes one about John McCain's ties to the gambling industry and then one about Segways. And the most recent post right now informs us all that it's Zachary Levi's birthday. We all heart Zachary Levi (he's the title character on sitcom Chuck, not Bristol Palin's fiancé, FYI--that's Levi Johnston), but this blog still doesn't exactly have a clear vision.

AOL can back it up with a ton of non-blog content, like its city directory and local news sites, but I can't really see how that would fit into DigitalCity.

Oh, well. Better luck next time, AOL.

CBS Television Stations has launched a new program to get its local news headlines onto blogs and social-media sites, the CBS division said Monday.

Called the CBS Local Ad Network, it's a way for participating region-focused blogs to pull in extra cash by embedding CBS news widgets on their sites and splitting the revenue of accompanying ads with CBS.

On Monday, the program was launched in a selection of the TV network's regional markets: Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago. Within the next few weeks, CBS has said, the CBS Local Ad Network will come to New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Miami, Sacramento, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore.

Some of the blogs currently participating in the new program are San Francisco's SFBayStyle and Boston's Red Sox Nation. Approved sites will be able to choose the content of the CBS headlines displayed (breaking news, sports, politics), as well as select from a number of options to determine, for example, whether they want video content in the widget.

Bloggers can't just embed a widget and hope for profits, CBS Television Stations Digital Media Group president Jonathan Leess told CNET News.com. "There's a screening process, obviously," he said. "We have to figure out or get some visibility into what the content is on that site, and then we screen, but we have a third party (Syndigo Networks) that administers all this for us."

CBS declined to share exact breakdowns of the revenue-distribution process. "All of it's based on certain traffic estimates from each of the sites, and (ad) placement," Leess said.

Inaugural advertisers in the program (depending on the region) include AT&T and Liberty Mutual Insurance.

Outside.in, a New York-based site that aggregates town-specific news, blog posts, and business listings into a sort of Local News 2.0, formally launched a discussion forum feature on Wednesday.

Thie move puts Outside.in more squarely in the league of Yelp and Craigslist, which supplement their respective business reviews and classifieds listings with lively local message boards.

Obviously, discussion boards don't mean anything if there isn't a solid base of users willing to contribute to them regularly. But there certainly are more than a few people who like to rant about their local school board, sidewalks crowded with strollers, and long lines at the post office, and many neighborhoods don't really have online hubs for town chatter yet.

There's a cool twist to Outside.in's message boards too. You can "attach" a location to your posts--if you're writing about a certain bar, for example, Outside.in will add a link to the listing if it detects the name of a local business. (You get to preview it first.)

Meanwhile, the "hyperlocal" niche of the Web continues to get more crowded, with the launch of EveryBlock last week.

What's currently shaking up on Outside.in's message boards for my home island of Manhattan? Finding the coolest bar in the Lower East Side neighborhood or the best place to go for happy hour around Union Square. It's good to see that users' priorities are in the right place.