Urbanspoon is a small Seattle startup that wants to help you find the perfect restaurant. Their goal: compete head on with Yelp and other user review sites, specifically around restaurants.

But they are approaching the market in a different way than Yelp and others. Instead of talking users into coming to their site and writing reviews, they’re taking a decentralized approach and aggregating available reviews from trusted sources around the web – local newspapers, citysearch, etc. The approach is very similar to what Rotten Tomatoes has done successfully with movies.

Users can vote on each restaurant in the system and can also leave comments – effectively their own reviews. And anyone that wants a review they’ve written on a blog or elsewhere to be included can do so by adding a bit of code to the post.

So far, so good. They’re claiming 1.5 million monthly page views on 500,000 unique visitors. The company covers fourteen U.S. cities currently, with fifteen more on the way. And they’ve done all of this with a three man team and no funding. All three founders, Ethan Lowry, Adam Doppelt and Patrick O’Donnell, are ex-Jobster employees.

Seattle-based Jobster has had a rough time over the last several months. They radically changed their business model and went through a round of layoffs. The company, and CEO Jason Goldberg, has faced criticism for all of these changes.

Now a new storm is brewing over a former employee, Jason Davis. Davis previously sold a recruiting blog to Jobster, and worked with the company for a while. He eventualy left, but apparently had a non-compete in place.

Davis may have violated that non-compete when he started a new blog, RecruitingBlogs.com. Jobster and Davis have been “discussing” the issue behind the scenes, but it all became public today when Jobster sent Davis a cease & desist letter (see here and here as well).

I’ve pinged Goldberg for his side of the story. His response is below.

Hi Mike.

I will make my only public comment on this here to you, as follows:

We at Jobster are actually big fans of the www.recruitingblogs.com website. It’s a great site and offers recruiters an online blogging community that can be very valuable.

Our issue is not with recruitingblogs.com, rather it is with the site’s founder, Jason Davis. Jason Davis sold the www.recruiting.com online recruiting blogging community website to Jobster a little over a year ago. Jason Davis stayed on to run www.recruiting.com until a few months ago – when his one-year contract with Jobster ended. We parted amicably and wish only the best for Jason Davis. As part of his departure from Jobster/recruiting.com, Jason agreed to a fairly standard non-compete.

Jason has now launched www.recruitingblogs.com.

As would be expected, we’ve asked Jason Davis to honor his contractual agreement with Jobster. We’ve also offered/suggested that there is probably a good way for us to work together going forward. When we spoke to Jason Davis last week, we offered for him to come up some ideas on how we might work together. We would like to work this out in a way that benefits everyone.

Today, Jason Davis decided to go public instead.

Our overarching intent at Jobster and with our Recruiting.com website remains to foster online community in the recruiting industry — the more the better. At the same time, Jobster needs to ensure that our employees and contractors uphold their commitments.

I am certain that we can and will arrive at a good outcome for everyone on this.

Jason Goldberg

I’m not familiar with the law in Washington on non compete agreements, but in California its pretty clear – if you sell your company to someone for stock, they’re enforceable. We’ll see how this develops.

Eyebrows were raised when Seattle-based Jobster shredded their business model and moved to free job listings in February. It was a direct assault on Monster, which charges up to $475 per job listing. Many of the commenters in the post discussing the change said it was the last ditch effort of a troubled company.

This week Jobster quietly rolled out phase two of the plan, adding pay-per-applicant job listings to the mix. The listings are still free, but companies who agree to pay a per applicant fee are shown on the top of search.

CEO Jason Goldberg says it will be a much more efficient model than anything that exists today. Companies don’t pay anything unless they receive a qualified job applicant. This gives Jobster the incentive to make sure lots of potential employees see their listing.

During a beta period, Jobster is charging $5 per applicant. Later they’ll allow companies to set qualifications, so they will only pay for, say, the application of someone who lives in San Francisco with Ruby on Rails development skills. At that time, they will also be moving to an auction model and let companies compete for those top places on search results pages.

Jobster is also the exclusive Job Listing provider to Facebook (mentioned at the end of this post), although the new Facebook developer platform would also allow other services to add their application. The new job listings will eventually make their way to Facebook, Goldberg says, increasing Jobster’s reach exponentially.

Monster.com is a fat target. It has a market cap of nearly $7 billion and generates over $1 billion per year in revenue. All that revenue is largely generated on paid job listings, starting off at $475 for a single listing. Hotjobs and a bunch of other services provide similar services, all for a fee. Even Craigslist charges for job listings in many markets.

Seattle-based Jobster, which has raised nearly $50 million in venture capital, previously had a similar model – charging employers a lot of money to help them find qualified candidates. But late last year they made a decision to try something different. They went through a round of layoffs earlier this year and are making a dramatic business model shift starting tonight, by making all job listings free (and much more).

Their goal is to do what PlentyOfFish is doing to Match.com. PlentyOfFish is a dating site very much like Match, but doesn’t charge its users to hook them up. The company is doing quite well based solely on advertising revenue, and has been a serious thorn in the side of the for-pay dating sites. By reducing the cost of a job listing to zero, Jobster hopes to make a large dent in Monster’s billion dollar a year revenue stream.

Jobster is also a social network, and is more like Facebook or LinkedIn than Monster.com or other job sites. Like LinkedIn, it’s a place people can keep their resume up to date at all times, even when they aren’t looking for a job. Users also tag themselves (your top five tags are called “supertags”), and Jobster will notify you of jobs that may fit your profile. See CEO Jason Goldberg’s profile page for an example. All of this tag-based matching comes from Jobby, a company Jobster acquired last year. Tags also help users match with other users, and additional information.

Employers can start listing jobs immediately and for free. The form (see image below) has just five fields (Company, Title, Location, Description, Tags). The employer will immediately be alerted to potential candidates based on the tags, and candidates will also see the opportunity appear within their profile. Jobster is also syndicating these listings out via RSS and other methods, so job search engines like Simply Hired and Indeed will be able to add these to other listings from around the web. Edgeio (a company I co-founded) will be one of the first partners to integrate Jobster data into their listings.

Given that Jobster already has a large footprint in the job listing space, this is more than an experiment. It’s a full frontal assault on Monster’s business model. This can also hit LinkedIn indirectly if people start focusing on Jobster as a more interesting place to keep their resumes and contacts. Monster will probably be keeping an alert eye on how Jobster is doing, and this may also force them to update their aging platform and pricing models to more modern standards. For employers and job seekers, this is nothing but good news.

In the same press release announcing the new product, Jobster also confirms the rumor that they have become Facebook’s exclusive partner for job listings (beating out Monster.com and others). The new functionality will be available this Spring.

Do job seekers and employers outside of Silicon Valley want user generated content, tagging and feeds in their employment services? The premise that they do will likely be put to the test on a global scale now that the fast growing job search site Jobster has landed $18 million more in venture funding from a team lead by international publishers Reed Elsevier. The company has now recieved almost $50 million in funding, from funders also including Ignition Partners, Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures.

Since adding a host of new social elements just last week, Jobster now brings most Web 2.0 features that you can imagine into the job search space. If Monster is the blue chip job search company in the accelerated history of web services then Jobster is trying to make itself the hip new player. Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg is explicitly positioning his company as MySpace in the workplace. Job seekers can create profiles, leave comments about their workplace and subscribe to RSS feeds.

Jobster recently acquired a service called GoJobby, has formed partnerships with SixApart, JobCentral and the VirtualEdge Corporation and says it’s seen seen 50% quarter over quarter growth over last five quarters.

But is this MySpace at work formula one with potential internationally? MySpace itself is widely expected to face serious challenges when it launches localized international versions beginning later this summer. Add to that the questionable sincerity of user generated content when it comes to matters of employment.

Jobster says it doesn’t really need the latest infusion of cash, but that Reed Elsiver’s international strength is exciting. Whether a substantial number of employers internationally will find it worth their investment to pay the monthly Jobster fee, or whether the new social features are considered hype driven and overpriced seems to me to be the key question.

Seattle based Jobster will announce the acquisition of brand new startup Jobby on Wednesday morning. Terms are not being disclosed.

I profiled Jobby when it entered it’s beta in late March. Unlike Indeed and Simply Hired, which aggregate job listing from other sites, Jobby takes resume information directly from Job Seekers and then invites employers to search through listings. Jobby also allows employers to search for highly specific skillsets and subscribe to future results via RSS. I gave Jobby a thumbs up: the Ajax interface for filling in skill/resume information, along with the excellent search features results in a really cool user experience. It will be interesting to see how Jobster integrates Jobby into its existing solutions.

Jobster has raised over $20 million in venture capital. Investors include Trinity Ventures, Ignition Partners and Mayfield.