The Social

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.

There aren't many new companies launching at this year's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which runs Tuesday through Friday. One of the few that are is Lunch.com, which strives to get a little more juice out of user-generated publishing.

Here's the premise of Lunch: You can review anything you want, from a TV show to a restaurant to a food product to a household appliance. I guess it aims to be, sort of, a Wikipedia for opinions. Founder J.R. Johnson, who started building the site after he sold previous creations VirtualTourist.com and OneTime.com to Expedia, said that Lunch started filling up its private beta by reaching out to frequent Amazon reviewers and received a very positive response.

You're also encouraged to network with other members and filter reviews through its "Similarity Network" function, an algorithm for finding like-minded users and matching them to one another. To ramp up Lunch's assessment of your preferences, you can play "speed-rating" games called Exhilarate, which are structured much like Netflix's recommendation feature.

Quite honestly, I have a hard time seeing people turn to a general reviews site when there are already well-established sites for reviews of businesses, books, movies, and the lot--not to mention a plethora of "social shopping" sites for consumer products. I feel like Lunch could've gained a lot more traction if it had made its debut two or three years ago, when user-generated content was a lot more noteworthy. But maybe that's just me.

Yelp Chief Executive Jeremy Stoppelman

(Credit: Yelp)

NEW YORK--"They have that saying, 'don't shoot the messenger,' but the reason they say that is because the messenger gets shot," Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me over coffee on Tuesday morning. "So I have to take my shots."

He was talking, of course, about the PR fiasco that ensued when the Emeryville, Calif.-based East Bay Express newspaper published a lengthy expose on the business reviews site, alleging that it strong-armed businesses into paying to remove negative reviews. As a fairly regular Yelp user, I was repulsed by the possibility that its corporate practices were so sketchy. But Stoppelman, visiting from the company's home base of San Francisco, claims there's no truth to the allegations.

"There are business owners out there who don't think consumer reviews are good," said Stoppelman, who called the expose's accusations a "conspiracy theory" and likened them to similar tiffs that have arisen over Google's advertising program. "(They're) looking for confirmation that Yelp is this bad entity."

He wrote last week in a lengthy post on the official Yelp blog that the activity called out as "extortion" and likened to the Mafia in the East Bay Express can be attributed in part to the algorithm that Yelp developed to weed out suspicious reviews.

"When we set out to built Yelp, we said we didn't want to be this anonymous reviews site," Stoppelman said to CNET News on Tuesday. "When you go to Yelp and you search for a business, (because of the algorithm) you're seeing reviews that are reasonably trustworthy." Yelp will, for example, flag reviews that appear to be spam, may be overly positive reviews coming from a business itself or overly negative ones coming from its competitors, or are coming from new users with no track record or profile data.

The fallout wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, Stoppelman explained. Inquiries and complaints in the wake of the East Bay Express story were primarily restricted to the San Francisco Bay Area. His visit to New York was routine and already on the books, rather than a face-saving measure.

Stoppelman also said he didn't think the allegations could be connected to, say, a rogue Yelp employee independently engaged in shady tactics. "This doesn't come up, because we have all these processes in place," he said. "It would be caught in the account manager hand-off."

But he did admit to some error on Yelp's part in not explaining its technologies and practices thoroughly enough--from the review-filtering algorithm to the sponsored-listing offerings.

"We haven't made it obvious enough about what systems are in place for our users, especially business users," he acknowledged. "As these stories have sort of come out, we've been focusing on making sure that the messaging is very, very clear and tight."

Given the Web's gradual shift toward a culture of "transparency," any site with a behind-closed-doors algorithm is going to be eyed with suspicion. The spotlight has fallen on the technology that powers social news site Digg, especially when people learned how to game it. And last spring, Facebook pulled a little-known friend-search feature when tech gossip blogs called it a "stalker list."

And the Yelp algorithm does pull down some legitimate reviews, something that was pointed out in the East Bay Express story and which Stoppelman said will invariably happen given Yelp's system. "We're not going to get it right, and it's not perfect, because you're going to lose some legitimate content as you try to get rid of the spammy content." Reviews that are taken down through the algorithm aren't deleted, he said; they're not displayed on a business' review page but still appear on the reviewer's profile.

Yelp nevertheless welcomes feedback, Stoppelman said. It's possible, for example, to review Yelp on Yelp. Over 1,500 people have reviewed it, and he said he tries to respond to as many of the reviewers as possible.

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.

Citysearch is still ahead, butupstart rival Yelp is catching up. Good thing Citysearch has brought in some much-needed new social features.

(Credit: Compete.com)

Citysearch, the online business directory owned by Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, has gotten a full makeover. It's available now at beta.citysearch.com--there's a more streamlined and Ajax-y interface, but a few important features have been tweaked as well. According to company representatives, this is about a year and a half in the making.

First of all, instead of focusing on a select number of metro areas, Citysearch has expanded to a whopping 75,000 towns and neighborhoods, meaning that you can narrow down your focus to New York's East Village or Los Angeles' Culver City. Additionally, there's Facebook Connect integration, meaning that you can see what your Facebook friends have recommended or reviewed on Citysearch. Also on the social side of things, reviewing businesses on Citysearch is easier and more up-front. Previously, there had been more attention on editorial reviews as opposed to user reviews.

And Facebook approves, apparently. "At Facebook, we've found that remarkable things happen when you get trust, user control and identity right--people share more information, and become more open and connected," Facebook communications czar Elliot Schrage said in a joint release. "Citysearch's innovative new site shows how Facebook Connect can help information flow faster through a site while creating a filter for users to engage with localized content through the lens of their friends, family and colleagues."

That's a big deal for Citysearch: fast-growing start-up Yelp has started to gain some market share in the "user-generated reviews" department. According to traffic firm Compete.com, Yelp is still smaller but catching up. (Citysearch, for that matter, syndicates some of its content to big portals like AOL.)

Finally, Citysearch has launched a mobile site compatible with a number of different browsers and handsets--yes, including Apple's iPhone.

Buzzd, a mobile service focused on "real-time" reviews of bars and restaurants, says it's making some inroads in the tough, crowded location-based networking market.

The New York-based start-up is set to release numbers on Thursday announcing that 1.2 million venues are now listed in its directory, 10 percent of which were added by users. As for demographics, about 80 percent of Buzzd's users (it doesn't provide specifics on active users) are in the U.S., concentrated around cities like New York and Los Angeles, with another 10 percent in Europe and 10 percent in India.

Like many "geo" services, Buzzd lets members tell their friends where they are; rival Brightkite also lets members post "notes" on those venues, but doesn't turn them into a real-time lookup service. Buzzd has partnered with event and venue listing services like Time Out, Flavorpill, MyOpenBar, and Zagat. You can also use Facebook's newly extended API to hook it up with your profile credentials.

While it's a mobile Web site that doesn't require a download or subscription service, Buzzd has nevertheless worked on forming carrier deals--and says that more are on the way--to improve visibility in exchange for ad revenue sharing.

So what's next? Founder Nihal Mehta told CNET News.com that the all-important iPhone application is on the way, as well as a "strategic investment" on behalf of a major player in the mobile market. He's not saying who that is, but one can guess it's likely a handset manufacturer (though probably not Nokia, because it just bought competitor Plazes) or a carrier.

Business reviews site Yelp will be focusing quite a bit on mobile features in the near future, including an upcoming location-aware iPhone app on the way, company representatives told CNET News.com Wednesday.

This will mean that iPhone users will be able to log onto the Yelp application and search for businesses and reviews of establishments close to their geographic coordinates. In other words, you will be able to look and find which sushi restaurants are within five blocks of your location--and see Yelp members' warnings on which ones might make you puke.

The application is still in development and does not have a timeline for release yet, so few concrete details are available. It'll likely rely on cell phone tower triangulation for location awareness rather than GPS; while the impending "iPhone 2.0" is widely believed to have GPS capability, but if the application uses triangulation, "Yelpers" with first-generation iPhones will be able to use the product as well.

This will be Yelp's first foray into location-aware services, which are a hot and developing niche of the social Web. Some services, like Loopt and Brightkite, focus on charting your friends on a map; others, like Buzzd and Socialight (in the U.K.) run services designed to pinpoint nearby restaurants and bars.

Yelp's entry into the location-aware market could potentially shake things up since the service already has a huge cult following in several major U.S. cities (it's approaching 3 million business reviews) and most other players are start-ups trying to build up loyal user bases. A location-aware mobile Yelp could deal a blow to newish companies like Whrrl, which offers pretty much the same kind of service.

The company has not said whether it will expand location-aware mobile services to devices beyond the iPhone, but Apple's handset is a logical starting point. Yelp, which is geared toward urban 20- and 30-somethings, pulls in a full percent of its traffic from iPhones, representatives said, and the company doesn't even operate an iPhone-specific mobile application yet. That could be due to the company's popularity in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, which happen to be (at least anecdotally) hubs of iPhone use.

Also on the agenda: international expansion, slated to come later this year. Currently, you can write a Yelp review for any business in the U.S., but not internationally. First in line is likely Canada, followed by other English-speaking countries before the site moves into translation efforts.

Yelp, the business reviews site famed for a vociferous user base willing to be brutally honest about the quality of their local restaurants, bars, bookstores, dog groomers, adult gift shops, and what-have-you, has launched a new service for those business owners to interact with the site's users.

Called "Yelp for Business Owners," the section of the site lets business owners register for special Yelp accounts, which they then need to verify by phone. Once registered, they have access to some analytics (namely to see how many people have been viewing their business page), receive e-mail alerts when they have new reviews, update public data like their hours of operation or contact information, and message the users who have already reviewed their business.

While Yelp will not charge for business owner accounts, it's a way for the company to get more eyes on its ad-supported site.

The service will likely have its biggest splash in San Francisco, where the start-up is based and where "Yelper" has become a mild pejorative among some restaurant and cafe owners.

Elsewhere, it might not have quite the effect. I live in New York, where the food and hospitality industries seem to have a bigger problem with influential food bloggers rather than reviews sites, and the IAC-owned Citysearch is still the online directory of choice for many.

q&a Last week, business reviews site Yelp (famous for its wild parties and opinionated members) announced that it had raked in $15 million in Series D venture funding--and that the San Francisco-based company would be opening a new office in New York. I caught up with Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman over the weekend to talk about a few numbers other than the five-star rating.

Yelp New York, in Manhattan's West Village, opens Monday. But according to Stoppelman, they won't be celebrating with one of the bashes that made his site a bit notorious.

You guys just raised $15 million. What was the first thing you did when you closed the round?
Jeremy Stoppelman: (Laughs.) I think it was in the afternoon, so I checked my e-mail. We haven't really done any celebration or anything like that.

But you're Yelp! Didn't you at least do a happy hour?
Stoppelman: Well, we have our events going on. Almost every week there's an event in some city. So I guess the day after we closed we met with some of the investors and had some drinks, but really it's been a low-key type of thing. We've had greater festivities in the past. I think a greater part of it is just like, for us, it's not as much of a milestone. It's obviously a great thing because we need the money so that we can grow the company at the maximum rate possible, but we're past a lot of the more "scary" stages where it really is like a, "Wow, we made it!" Things have been going really well. We've got a lot of traction. The brand is growing stronger and stronger. So this is just like a continuance.

So why did you choose to open an office in New York? Is it for proximity to the ad industry?
Stoppelman: There was the connection to the ad industry; and ad buyers, there are a lot of them there, and then there are all the media industries. And then it's simply that New York is one of the linchpin cities or key cities in the U.S., and so we feel like it's going to be our biggest market or one of our biggest markets, and that we should be there physically as well.

Is it your second biggest market after San Francisco?
Stoppelman: No, it's like San Francisco Bay Area, then L.A., and then New York.

Did you consider opening the office in any other cities?
Stoppelman: (New York) seemed like the logical choice, you know, covering each coast.

How many people are you going to have in that office?
Stoppelman: Initially it's just a handful, under 10 people, but then towards the end of the year we'll be adding a lot of sales folks.

What's your projection for the number of Yelp employees by the end of '08?
Stoppelman: I don't really know. I don't have a number for you.

What're you at right now?
Stoppelman: We're at a hundred-something, a hundred and ten.

I know that in San Francisco "the Yelper" is almost a cultural figure now, and it's not always a good image. Are you ever feeling like you're doing damage control?
Stoppelman: We hear from businesses daily. People are writing reviews, business owners are watching them, (and) sometimes they feel like it's unfair and so they let us know, in which case we take a look at that review and see if it meets our guidelines. There's no damage control, there's always a dialogue around, you know, conversation that's happening on our site. There's nothing outside of that that we really actively do.

The other key point is just to say that 85 percent of businesses on Yelp have a three-star rating or above. And so it's easy to take a single comment personally or get really bummed out about it, and we tend to remember those most vividly. The reality is, the vast majority of comments are neutral to positive.

Where do you see Yelp in five years?
Stoppelman: I guess the first step is expansion in the U.S., geographic expansion, so seeing Yelp to expand to pretty much every major city in the U.S. is the next logical step.

Do you have international expansion plans?
Stoppelman: Yeah. Of course we'll get to international. I think there's a timing question of when does that hit, when does that happen, but certainly the formula continues to work all across the U.S. so you would think that this site would be just as well-received in a lot of other countries as well. There's just a whole lot of engineering work that goes into preparing the site for international (editions) because it would need to be able to handle multi-language, et cetera, et cetera.

Will that $15 million go in part toward server and other hardware costs? Are those going up?
Stoppelman: It's not changing that dramatically. Our site is fairly low-data-intensive compared to some of the other stuff out there. We're not pushing a ton of video or anything like that. It's actually pretty manageable, cost-wise, from a technology perspective.