Say what you will about the quality of the reviews on Yelp or the lengths it will go to get verboten features into its iPhone app, it has made the jump from Web 2.0 darling to a mainstream service. Over the past year, Yelp has nearly doubled its U.S. audience, while incumbent CitySearch has remained flat. In July, Yelp had 8.6 million unique U.S. visitors, up 80 percent from a year ago. Citysearch, on the other hand, literally had zero growth, staying at 15.4 million uniques, although it bottomed at 13 million in April and has come back up since then (comScore).

Yelp also has the No. 1 travel app on the iPhone (it is No. 26 overall). Whereas Citysearch’s similar iPhone app is not even in the top 20 travel apps.

Yelp’s pageviews and average time spent per user on the site are also up 150 percent and 22 percent, respectively. In fact, the 3.3 average minutes per visitor on Yelp is above Citysearch’s 2.3 minute average. But comScore shows a steep drop in both pageviews and average time spent starting in May, with a leveling off in July. Citysearch experienced similar drops. (See charts below). It’s hard to say what is causing these drops. It could be that people are not finding what they are looking for, or the opposite, that they are finding what they need faster due to better site design. I suspect it has something to do with the latter. For instance, a much-improved Citysearch redesign went site-wide in March and Yelp is constantly tweaking its site. Update: Kara Nortman, the executive who runs Citysearch, says that the pageview numbers are down slightly, but not as much as comScore suggests. Part of this has to do with Citysearch actually going through the site and “pulling out pages that are not great consumer experiences,” which hurts SEO, but improves the site overall. Citysearch is also trying to reduce the number of searches it takes ti get to what you want, which also causes pageviews to drop.

I asked Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman about the pageview situation, and he sent me an internal Google Analytics chart pasted at bottom of this post). “As you can see we’ve continued to grow pageviews smoothly throughout the summer,” he says, “so it looks like the effect Comscore is reporting is spurious.” There is definitely a discrepancy there. Stoppleman also says that worldwide Yelp did 157 million pageviews in August (although he thinks that is becoming a less a meaningful metric as Ajax redesigns reduce the need for page refreshes) and more than 25 million unique visitors. (The comScore numbers cited above are only for the U.S.)

Yelp came out with a major update for its iPhone app in April, right about the time the pageviews started to allegedly decline. But Stoppelman doesn’t think that is it either. There might be some shift over to mobile, but he’s seeing the following trends:

Mobile usage for us is lowest early in the week and climbs throughout, peaking on Saturday. Desktop web usage (especially contributions) tends to be highest on Monday or Tuesday (though Yelp.com reader traffic sometimes peaks on Fridays as people plan their weekend in the office .

No matter which way you cut the numbers, though, Yelp is gaining fast on Citysearch. Update “I worry about everyone,” says Citysearch’s Nortman. “I think you’ll start to see some pretty strategic initiatives roll out across the web and mobile. We have this new neighborhood platform in place. We have to fill it up with trusted content.” That is how Citysearch will try to stand apart, by having reviews and other content that is more trustworthy than Yelp’s. Which site do you trust more?

Average Minutes Per Visitor

Total Pageviews

Yelp’s Daily Pageviews (Google Analytics)

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Editor’s Note:

Yelp has had no shortage of hullabaloo surrounding the most recent improvement to its iPhone app. Rightfully so, it added an Augmented Reality view for its restaurant reviews. Using the AR view, users of the Yelp app can pan around using their camera, and see information overlaid, presumably, on top of the restaurant of their query, garnering review information. While this functionality is certainly useful, and nothing short of excellent eye candy, could there be a thorn with this rose?

Augmented Reality has been all the rage with app developers recently, originally employing unreleased SDK features to build the technology. However, in recent months, it was discovered that the new iPhone OS 3.1 upgrade changed the camera functionality in a way that would enable app developers to build their Augmented Reality views in a more sanctioned environment. This development has been a shot in the arm for AR developers, and there seems to be many implementations being built. However, it was understood that the world would have to wait for AR on the iPhone, at least until iPhone OS 3.1 was released. That was, until, Yelp’s most recent iPhone app got approved in the store with an easter egg that, after shaking the device three times, enabled an Augmented Reality view.

Call it sneaky, call it clever, but I call it deceit. Apple has put forth specific guidelines, and “rules” around their app development, and while I don’t always agree, it’s the reality of how we must work with them for now. Yelp hid their easter egg behind shaking the device, which isn’t always the most intuitive action to take on an app that contains some maps and lists. As a result, the unsanctioned Augmented Reality view was gone from Apple’s radar. The same would seem to be true with a couple other applications that snuck in AR features as updates to their apps. As recently as last month, Apple was telling developers making AR apps that they would have to wait for iPhone 3.1. It was only after approval, that Yelp announced that the functionality existed. There was palpable excitement around the Yelp’s announcement (and the other apps), having been the first AR apps to be approved, but something smelled afoul.

My concern is that Yelp has set an awful precedent by this act. Now, every app developer will likely undergo even more scrutiny. Accessing private API’s goes against the agreement every iPhone developer has to abide by when submitting applications to the App Store. By subverting this agreement through an “easter egg”, Yelp could very well cause the approval process to become more draconian. Whereas before, Apple was primarily looking for trademark violations, “correct” usage of their Human Interface Guidelines, and show-stopping bugs, they’ll now have to go over each app with fine-toothed comb to make sure no feature that is likely to be unsanctioned will be released. Now granted, this may also be seen as a big cry for openness in the App Store, but so long as the App Store approval process remains in the status quo, deceitful acts like this won’t continue to go unnoticed by them.

The implications are simple: a longer wait time for apps to be approved, longer time for bug fixes and overall, a poorer experience for developers and users both. While I hope for a less strict App Store, so long as that’s not the case, I hope more that developers stick to more of the straight and narrow (read: not so shady tactics) so they don’t ruin it for the rest of us.

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We’ve written about the many iterations of Yelp’s iPhone app and today, Yelp has broadened its mobile horizons by launching the much awaited Blackberry Yelp app. You can download it here.

Similar to the iPhone app, the Blackberry app uses location-aware technology to determine your current location and will then let you search for nearby businesses, read reviews and access a moveable map, which is powered by Bing rather than Google. This is interesting considering the maps feature on the iPhone app is powered by Google Maps. Yelp says that Bing was used because the search engine provided map tile access, which was essential for movable maps on the app.

The app lets you zoom in and out on a location and then change your search based on that geographic area. Yelp says the Blackberry app works in the US, Canada and the UK (which is everywhere Yelp is available).

A spokeswoman for Yelp told us that the Blackberry app doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as the current version of the iPhone app. It appears that this version of the app is most similar to the version 1 of the iPhone app. Yelp says that the Blackberry app will continue to be updated with new features in the future.

As we’ve said in the past, Yelp keeps rolling out new iPhone apps with powerful and noteworthy features. In April, they released Version 2 and added the ability for users to leave reviews on local businesses, giving people the ability to post reviews directly from their iPhone.

Version 3, which we wrote about a few weeks ago, adds a few more compelling features, including a “Sales And Offers Near You” feature which lets users find deals that are physically close to them. You can sort by distance (in blocks), price, whether the business is open right then, or by neighborhood. Businesses can add special offers for free on their business page.

Yelp has made a strong move in the mobile space, and this latest app is representative of its ambitions to broaden its horizons. Perhaps an Android app is next?

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Version 3, which should be available soon, adds more useful features. The one that really stands out is “Sales And Offers Near You” which lets users find deals that are physically close to them. Sort by distance (in blocks), price, whether the business is open right then, or by neighborhood. Businesses can add special offers for free on their business page.

Other features include movable maps, and new ways for users to add content. Users can vote on reviews with UFC buttons (useful, funny or cool) and send compliments to reviewers. Users can also now follow Talk conversations via the iPhone.

Too bad none of this stuff is available on the Android. I might actually use it. Oh well, at least I can watch via the video below:

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MojoPages, a local listings search engine, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Austin Ventures. MojoPages’s search technology powers local business listing search engines for local newspapers, and TV and radio stations.

Originally a stand alone search engine for business listings, the company found that it could not compete with bigger players like Citysearch and Yelp. So Jon Carder, CEO of MojoPages, decided to overhaul the site’s business model and offer white label, branded local search engine technology to media companies. The site’s listings are similar to Yelp in that they offer user reviews and ratings of businesses. To date, MojoPages has contracted with more than 1,000 media sites to create branded local business search engines.

Carder says MojoPages will use the funds to expand the capabilities of its Yelp-like search engine, so that the search engine will become an aggregator of listings and reviews. The site hopes to pull local info from sites like Yelp, CitySearch, and YellowPages into one engine.

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Yelp’s having a bad day. It may not be as bad as the day iMindi is having, who managed to delete all their user accounts, but it’s still a doozy.

Yelp managed to pair a normally non-offensive headline in a newsletter article about biking (“Put the Fun Between Your Legs”) with a noble sponsor (SF Women Against Rape) to create one heck of an offensive and awkward situation. Apart, those words are fine. Put them together and people go nuts.

The title has been changed to “Corrected: A Bicycle Built For Yelp!” along with a message “Due to an editorial oversight, an earlier version of the Weekly Yelp contained a headline that was inappropriate for the context. We apologize for the mistake.” They’re also apologizing on Twitter, where the newsletter became quite the topic of conversation.

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Are you looking for the best beer bars in the world, good places to make out in San Francisco, or where to go on the Big Island in Hawaii? A travel recommendation site called nextstop mixes social recommendations with search and adds a reputation system and elements of gameplay to come up with a new social online travel guide.

The site has been in beta for a few months, although it hasn’t gotten much attention yet. It was started by a couple of ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who helped launch Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups, and Picassa (Graham). A third co-founder, Charles Lin, was a Stanford classmate of Graham’s. The site grew out of their frustration with finding interesting things to do in unfamiliar places. “It is difficult to discover something new when you don’t know what to look for,” says Sjogreen.

Everything on nextstop is geared towards getting people to recommend their favorite places and organize those recommendations into guides. There are various ways to explore the site, including a search box, by city, a guide view, or a map view (see screen shots below). The recommendations can be collected together into guides (like this one for an architecture tour), which can be explicitly “liked” by members. The guides can be sorted by most recent, most liked, or most viewed. You can save any place or guide in a wishlist for later viewing.

But it is the social aspects which give the site an extra edge. Each recommendation acts as a vote (for any given place, you can see how many people recommend it) and you can also vote individual recommendations up and down. Every member gets a reputation score. You get 2 points every time somebody else votes up one of your recommendations, and 15 points when they “like” one of your guides. To fight spam, your reputation score goes down every time somebody votes down one of your recommendations or flags one of your entries. Entries can also be edited wiki-style. Still, it would be fairly easy to game the system with a few friends.

The members with the most points get recognized on a leaderboard. And you can follow any other member, which lets you see all of their entries and actions on the site in an activity stream (which you can export to other services as an RSS feed). In addition to the reputation points, members can also earn “badges” for accomplishing certain goals, such as being the first to recommend a place, for getting 100 views on a guide, or 10 likes. Any recommendation can be shared via email, Facebook or Twitter (but sharing is not automatic, it has to be explicitly selected for each recommendation). Individual guides can also be shared as embeddable badges or widgets.

The site makes very simple to create a recommendation. These are not meant to be in-depth reviews, rather curated suggestions of things to do. It uses a combination of search APis from Google (for local search, geo-location, image search, and maps) and Yahoo Boss (also for image search) to help you find and auto-complete many of the items that go into each recommendation.

Once you create an account or sign in using Facebook Connect, you can type in the name of practically any bar, restaurant, tourist attraction, or business after clicking “add a recommendation.” It will suggest places it recognizes along with their addresses, and if one of them is what you are trying to recommend, you click on it and nextstop will place it on a Google map and find pictures. You pick an image, add a short Twitter-length recommendation no more than 160 characters, and categorize it as a place to eat/drink, stay/sleep, or do/explore along with an approximate price range (free, inexpensive, mid-range, high-end). Then the recommendation is created and other people can find it on the site. I did this for a restaurant in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bar Tabac, and it found it immediately, along with a great picture.

There is plenty of competition for online travel guides and social recommendations, starting with TripAdvisor and Yelp down to a bevy of startups including Dopplr, Offbeat Guides and TripSay. But nextstep manages to do things a little bit different. It is not trying to be comprehensive, it is just trying to provide travelers a highly selective and vetted list of things to do and places to visit.

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Yelp’s version 2.0 of its iPhone app has officially hit Apple’s App store. We reported on Yelp’s focus on the mobile space and its importance here.

As we wrote recently, the new app gives consumers even more ease in automatically reviewing businesses via their iPhone and enhances its existing GPS capabilities. The updated version of the app now lets Yelpers write reviews directly from their iPhone through a Twitter-like “Quick Tips” feature that allows users to create 140 character tips. This was sorely lacking in the original version. The tips will be accessible on the iPhone app and the site itself (if popular) and will also be shown in a feed using GPS capabilities when users search businesses.

Like before, the app leverages GPS in the iPhone to list reviews, tips, and photos written and taken around a user’s location. The app will also feature a Friend Feed feature that will pull in your friends activities. Users can draft a full review of a restaurant, bar or business from their iPhone and then post it later to Yelp.com. Yelp is also upgrading the app to become more compatible in Canada and the UK.

The combination of local reviews and mobile is significant because Yelp now allows consumers to post reviews as they are eating, drinking or visiting a business. Think about the review of a restaurant that had bad service. Likely, the consumer will be emotionally charged about the poor service. Before the iPhone app, the consumer would write the review after the restaurant visit, when he or she had cooled off a bit. Now the new app will allow the angry consumer to enter a particularly distasteful, and emotionally charged review directly from the restaurant’s table.

And the combination of using GPS to see reviews of businesses directly where you are in an area is fascinating. Yelp is making it incredibly easy for consumers to quickly access listings, reviews and ratings of businesses without having to input their location. There is definite potential for this app to become even more popular than its earlier version. Yelp’s previous iPhone app is less than a year old and it already accounts for 5% of Yelp’s overall traffic, which adds up to be around roughly 1 million monthly visitors.

Yelp’s next move should be incorporating Facebook Connect with its site and iPhone app. Currently, you can add Yelp friends on the site and get personalized feeds of reviews from people who are your friends and random people who share your local restaurant or bar tastes. But it would be really cool to be able to see your Facebook friend’s reviews of local businesses, similar to MySpace Local, a partnership between MySpace and CitySearch to combine CitySearch business listings and the MySpace community.

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NileGuide, a one-stop travel planning site, is rolling out several new features to its travel booking and planning portal. You can see our original review of the site here. NileGuide has re-designed the site with a sleek interface, a few more bells and whistles, added more geographic coverage areas, and created several trip planning tools to enhance the planning process.

The layout and general concept of the site has remained the same but Nile Guide has added more graphic imagery and high quality photos of destinations to add to the aesthetics of the site. It has also added 20 more destinations, so that it now includes customized, in-depth information for 100 destinations worldwide. Like the original version of the site, NileGuide aggregates information about destinations from over 10 sources, including Citysearch, OpenTable, Priceline, and Expedia, as well as adding its reviews from local experts who are familiar with the area. Now NileGuide has “suggested itineraries” for each destination. With all of this information, NileGuide has created neighborhood guides for various neighborhoods within each destination (much like CitySearch does). The site has interactive maps with the top destinations in each neighborhood. With NileGuide’s search filters, you can easily choose the right spot for any occasion, with options such as “price,” “kid-friendly,” hip,” and “upscale.”

NileGuide has also added a search widget comparison tool that lets you search and compare prices for both flights and cars via Priceline, Kayak, Hotwire, and Orbitz. The hotel search feature now injects real-time pricing availability powered by Priceline’s API. NileGuide lets you book your hotel directly through its site and offers comparison prices from Expedia.

Each selection, whether it be hotel, flight, restaurant, event, or bar can be dragged and dropped into the virtual itinerary, which at the end of the trip planning process can be converted into a handy PDF file (that can be emailed or printed), complete with all the necessary information, pictures and maps.

As we said in our original post on NileGuide, the site wants to be way more than a travel planning site and this makeover reinforces this ambition. The consumer and expert reviews combined with the ability to book flights and cars truly make it more of a one-stop-shop than its previous version. The travel search, planning and booking space is chock full of sites doing similar things—TripAdvisor also helps create itineraries but NileGuide’s new features and search capabilities go further. Zicasso and Offbeat Guides and TripWolf also assist consumers in the online travel planning process. Founded in 2006 and based in San Francisco, NileGuide has received $9.5 million in funding from investors including Draper Richards, KPG Ventures, Austin Ventures, and Tenaya Capital.

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Local review sites like Yelp have irrevocably changed the way consumers find businesses in a particular area, and truly given power to the consumer in finding the best place to eat a meal, grab a drink, etc. And the potential of putting local reviews and listings on mobile devices is immense. Yelp’s existing iPhone app is less than a year old and it already accounts for 5% of Yelp’s overall traffic, which adds up to be around roughly 1 million monthly visitors.

In the next few days, Yelp will be launching a new version of its popular iPhone app which we’ve reviewed. The new app gives consumers even more ease in automatically reviewing businesses via their iPhone and enhances its exiting GPS capabilities. The updated version of the app now lets Yelpers write review directly from their iPhone through a Twitter-like “Quick Tips” feature that allows users to create 140 character tips. This was sorely lacking in the original version. The tips will be accessible on the iPhone app and the site itself (if popular) and will also be shown in a feed using GPS capabilities when users search businesses. Like before, the app leverages GPS in the iPhone to list reviews, tips, and photos written and taken around a users location. The app will also feature a Friend Feed feature that will pull in your friends activities. Users can also draft a full review of a restaurant, bar or business from their iPhone and then post it later to Yelp.com. Yelp is also upgrading the app to become more compatible in Canada and the UK.

Since its launch in 2004, Yelp caught on pretty quickly and has seen consistent growth. Yelp currently has over 5.5 million reviews in the site. Google Analytics says Yelp has had 20.5 million unique visits in the past 30 days. Comscore’s estimate for February was a little more conservative, at around 7 million unique visits for Yelp.com. But Yelp’s monthly unique visits more than doubled from the same month, last year. Along the way, Yelp has decimated most of its competitors. Insider Pages laid off 2/3 of their staff and sold quickly to CitySearch in February 2007, Intuit said “goodbye” to Zipingo in August 2007, and Judy’s Book closed their doors in October 2007. CitySearch remains as Yelp’s lone competitor in the local reviews space. To date, Yelp has raised 31 million in capital.

The combination of local reviews and mobile is so compelling because Yelp now allows consumers to post reviews as they are eating, drinking or visiting a business. Think about the review of a restaurant that had bad service. Likely, the consumer will be emotionally charged about the poor service. Before the iPhone app, the consumer would write the review after the restaurant visit, when he or she had cooled off a bit. Now, the angry consumer can enter a particularly distasteful, and emotionally charged review directly from the restaurant’s table. Additionally, the combination of using GPS to see reviews of businesses directly where you are in an area is fascinating. Yelp is making it incredibly easy for consumers to quickly access listings, reviews and ratings of businesses without having to input there location.

Of course, the transparency and potential negative backlash businesses can suffer from sites like Yelp or CitySearch, has ignited businesses to fight back. Businesses have started anti-Yelp websites and even sued Yelp users for negative or unfair reviews. Yelp lets businesses fight back with a suite of tools to take part in the conversations consumers are having about their businesses.

Yelp’s next move should be incorporating Facebook Connect with its site and iPhone app. Currently, you can add Yelp friends on the site and get personalized feeds of reviews from people who are your friends and random people who share your local restaurant or bar tastes. But it would be really cool to be able to see your Facebook friend’s reviews of local businesses, similar to MySpace Local, a partnership between MySpace and CitySearch to combine CitySearch business listings in the MySpace community.

Here’s a video detailing the new version of Yelp’s iPhone App:

And screenshots below:

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Last night we released the finalist names for the Crunchies Awards. Vote here for who you think should win. We’ve set up a site that is pretty self-explanatory, with all of the names of each finalist for every category, along with links to their Websites and Crunchbase profiles where you can learn more about each one before voting. The Crunchies represents the best the Web had to offer in 2008, and you get to help choose who will win. Below is a voter’s guide for two of the major categories to get you started.

Best Overall
Amazon Web Services
Facebook
Android
hulu
Twitter

Best Overall is the big prize. Amazon Web Services makes it as a finalist this year because of the sheer number of startups that are built on top of its cloud computing infrastructure. Facebook won last year, but makes a return as a nominee due to popular demand. Facebook continued to gain massive mainstream adoption in 2008 (with 140 million members now) and launched some major initiatives to extend its social computing platform beyond its site, most notably Facebook Connect (which by itself is a finalist for Best Technology Innovation, going up against Google Friend Connect). But does Facebook deserve to win again?

This was also the year that Google launched its Android phone, bringing the unadulterated Web to mobile devices beyond the iPhone (which won Best Gadget last year for its 2G version). Hulu emerged as a rarity in the Web video world, a popular site with a serious revenue model. And Twitter broke out as the service everyone can’t stop talking (or Tweeting) about. As with any new communication technology, people keep finding novel ways to use Twitter’s public instant-messaging service.

Best New Startup of 2008
Dropbox
FriendFeed
GoodGuide
Tapulous
Topspin Media
Yammer

This category recognizes the best startup to launch publicly in 2008. Dropbox makes it dead-simple to transfer files between computers. It creates a Dropbox folder on your computer that you just drag files into, and then they become available to anyone else with access to that folder. FriendFeed sparked the whole lifestreaming movement this year, and kept adding improvements that makes it easier to filter the Web through the actions of everyone in your various social networks. GoodGuide has created an impressive product database (and iPhone app) that tells you at a glance how green or safe that baby cream or toy is that you just put in your shopping cart.

Tapulous created some of the most popular iPhone apps with Tap Tap Revenge, Tap Tap Dance, and Twinkle (a Twitter client, of course), despite some internal turmoil. Topspin Media, founded by former Yahoo Music chief Ian Rogers, is trying to help bring the music industry into the 21st Century by embracing the Internet as a marketing vehicle instead of a necessary evil. And Yammer is an enterprise version of Twitter which won the top prize at this year’s TechCrunch50.

Here are the finalists for some of the other categories. To see a complete list, go to the Crunchies site and vote for who you think should win. Voting ends January 5.

Best Technology Innovation
Facebook Connect
Google Friend Connect
Google Chrome
Windows Live Mesh
Swype
Yahoo BOSS

Best New Gadget
Android G1
Asus 1000 Netbook Computer
Flip MinoHD video camera
iPhone 3G
SlingCatcher

Best App
Get Satisfaction
Google Reader
Minted
meebo
MySpace Music
Yelp

Best Mobile App
Google Mobile (for iPhone)
Imeem Mobile (for Android)
Pandora Radio (for iPhone)
rolando (for iPhone)
ShopSavvy (for Android)
Ocarina (for iPhone)

Most Likely To Make the World a Better Place
Akoha
Better Place
Causes
CO2Stats
GoodGuide
Kiva

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Both even share the exact same navigation buttons on the bottom: Nearby, Search, and Bookmarks. Only the first button on Citysearch is different. It shows Featured editorial content from Citysearch editors for the city you are in. Yelp opted for a Recent button instead, which Citysearch places on its Bookmarks page.

The two apps are really similar in look and feel (see screenshots above), but under the hood they are different because they are pulling from different databases. Citysearch is taking advantage of its recent overhaul, which reclassified every piece of data by neighborhood. That helps when you search for a place to eat nearby. You still can’t search by neighborhood (only zipcode and city), but that is coming soon. Also coming soon will be the ability to upload photos and other multimedia along with your reviews.

What is powerful about both of these apps is giving people the ability to rate or review a restaurant or a store right as they are eating or having whatever experience they want to share. Ultimately, the one you prefer will boil down to the one whose reviews you trust the most. (Correction: The Yelp app actually only lets you upload photos, not reviews. So advantage, Citysearch on that one).

But next time you have an amazing meal or have a nasty run-in with a waiter, just whip out your iPhone and tell the world.

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CEO Jeremy Stopellman, noticing our Comscore comparison of the services – “According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques)” – emailed us with some of their internal traffic numbers and stats.

Yelp’s Google Analytics stats for the past thirty days show 15.8 million unique visitors, way above the six million Comscore records. And Yelp also shows other interesting stats in the chart below: 4 million reviews, with 34% restaurants, 23% shopping, 8% beauty and fitness, etc. Users are 51% male and 49% female, and 65% have a college degree.

Not bad for a company that was born just four years ago.

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SearchMonkey is a key part of Yahoo’s attempts to embrace the semantic web and open standards in general.

With SearchMonkey, site owners create “applications” for Yahoo search that can be installed by users in the same sense that Facebook applications can be installed. Each application modifies results for a certain URL specification (for example, all reference pages on Wikipedia or product pages on Amazon). Modifications include both changes to the basic elements of a search result (the title and description) and additions such as an image, deep links, and key/value pairs.

Users can also add additional widgets via the Yahoo Search Gallery.

Here’s the Yelp search result example we used in our first post about SearchMonkey:

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Yelp almost immediately caught on organically in San Francisco, but founders Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons ran into some early criticism. Rumors circulated that they were paying people to leave reviews on the site. Some users were outraged, claiming that paid reviews couldn’t be untainted. Yelp claimed that they were only “marketing assistants” employed by the company to “get the ball rolling” in new cities, and the reviews themselves were honest.

2006 proved to be the year of new competition, with Judy’s Book receiving an $8 million round in November 2005, Intuit releasing Zipingo in October 2005, and idealab’s Insider Pages receiving a cool $8.5 million Series A in March 2006. A daunting situation for a new startup to be in. But Yelp pulled through it to secure a $10 million in a Series B from Benchmark Capital in October 2006 and was named one of the 50 coolest sites on the web.

Then the competition started dropping like flies. Insider Pages laid off 2/3 of their staff and sold quickly to CitySearch in February 2007, Intuit said “goodbye” to Zipingo in August 2007, and Judy’s Book closed their doors in October 2007. Yelp was the sole survivor.

When Yelp released their API in August 2007, they were doing pretty well, getting 1.4 million U.S. visitors and 6 million page views per month. They’ve seen rapid growth since, now at almost 15 million U.S. visitors per month, surpassing competitor CitySearch in March (via Compete). Yelp has raised $31 million in capital, and mainstream press is all over them.

All that press gives business owners the idea that they need to pay attention to Yelp. So they ask their customers to leave positive reviews. Those customers then become Yelp users, and may leave reviews on other businesses, too. A virtuous and self sustaining cycle is created.

But when can you truly say that a company has “made it?”

It’s when people start hating you, of course.

Sites like Yelp-Sucks and IHateYelp have been popping up, with the general theme being an angry business owner who was Yelped. Those business owners that think they must use Yelp for competitive reasons are getting frustrated over some of Yelp’s policies, and are starting to complain about it. Loudly.

The good news for Yelp is that when businesses are afraid of you, it’s only because they realize how much power you really have. See, for example, Paypal and Ebay, two of the most reviled and profitable businesses on the Internet.

The major complaint is negative reviews, and how to get rid of them. But business owners are also complaining that they can’t use their accounts to leave reviews on other businesses, as well as a number of other complaints.

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said recently in the NY Times, “We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third.” Their goal is clearly to make businesses need Yelp, but not to expect a lot of help when it comes to disputes. Complain all you want, you’re just proving that you need Yelp more than they need you.

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If Yahoo Local were a standalone startup, it might look like Center’d. Partly that is because CEO Jennifer Dulski used to be the general manager in charge of Yahoo Local. Center’d, which publicly launches today, is a mixture of an event-planning/invitation site and a highly targeted local search engine, with a little social networking thrown in.

The entire site is set up to do two things: plan and explore. You import your email contacts, put in your zip code, and off you go. There is a calendar view for local events, and a map view for local destinations.

The company started out as FatDoor, a failed social network for neighbors. It took the $5.5 million it raised last October from Norwest Venture Partners and Keynote Ventures, and rebooted as Center’d. The chief technology officer is Chandu Thota, previously the lead developer on Microsoft Virtual Earth. I reviewed the site last April:

Center’d is both a local search engine and an event-planning application. You can search places for restaurants, hotels, schools, museums, stores, etc., and the results appear on a Google map. There is also a calendar view. Once you connect with friends on the system their events pop up in your searches. And you can also create your own events and get your friends to help decide the details. For instance, things like the location and date can be voted on. Want to have a party by the sea? Ask your invited guests if they’d rather go to Stimson Beach or Montaro Beach, and if next Sunday is better than this Saturday. You can also assign tasks for them to sign up for: bring lobsters, bring wine, bring volleyball.

The site is perfectly serviceable and looks like it will do a decent job with both event planning and local search. The interface is heavy on Ajax, with the screen telescoping open as you go through the options. It is very similar to Pingg in that regard, except it is much more limited in what it can do. But Center’d is also not doing anything appreciably different from many other startups on the event-planning side, including Pingg, Socializr, and MyPunchbowl. It does have the local search piece, but so does Yelp, Yahoo, and Google.

Still, when you are starting out with FatDoor, anything is an improvement.

Since then, the site has been improved. Places can be saved and commented on. And it lets you connect to people through places, such as schools, stores, or museums. Social + local. Isn’t that the original definition of community?

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Smalltown, a company out to help local businesses establish themselves online, is spreading its reach on the web and in the real world by founding a new site at WebCards.com.

We first reviewed Smalltown in October 2006 when it launched a destination site for so-called “WebCards”. These compact mini-sites provide overview information about businesses located in any of 6 Bay Area cities. They are categorized according to business type and designed to show up highly in search results, despite being based entirely in Flash.

By default, they show information leased from a local data source and are displayed for free. However, businesses can claim their webcards for $600/year, thereby taking control of them and gaining the ability to add special content like videos, photos, coupons, and contact forms.

Until now, these webcards could only be found in the areas of Smalltown’s destination site designated for particular cities. But now with the launch of WebCards.com, businesses from the world over can create their own webcards and embed them anywhere on the web. Smalltown has also formed partnerships with companies like Trulia to distribute them more proactively to external sites. And when webcards are visited through search engine results, they’ll appear as standalone sites instead of just part of a local directory.

It’ll cost $9/month for businesses to create webcards on WebCards.com. The company plans to create more destination sites around particular cities on Smalltown.com; just which cities depends on those that accumulate the most webcards on WebCards.com. When new city destination sites are established, business owners will have the opportunity to pay extra and have their webcards posted on them.

CEO Hal Rucker says the new WebCards.com property constitutes a strategy to broaden the company’s scope, in contrast to the depth and focus of Smalltown.com. So far only about 600 businesses have created so-called “enhanced webcards” for $600/year. It’ll need over 60 webcards created on WebCards to make as much revenue as one on Smalltown, where these cards have higher visibility. Businesses will have to be convinced that the cards’ portable nature and SEO juice pays off, although $9/month isn’t a hard sell.

Smalltown differs from other sites for local business information like Yelp in that it focuses on merchant-created content. While Yelp has recently given more power over listings to businesses, it remains a consumer and reviewer-focused site.

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Businesses like Oakland coffee shop Cafe Rooz felt slighted by the ratings site when a few vocal customers posted poor reviews. They went so far as to declare No Yelpers. But still others have benefited. According to Yelp, Joe Alexander’s San Francisco based mattress store, Keetsa, gets 80 percent of its total monthly business directly from Yelp.

In either case it’s a sign of the influence the site has over businesses as a lead generation – or degeneration – tool. Now Yelp is releasing a suite of business tools to give business owners tools to participate more directly in the conversation.

The suite is available at biz.yelp.com and lets businesses:

• Message customers who have reviewed their business
• See how many prospective customers viewed their business page
• Update business information instantly (i.e. hours of operation, categories)
• Receive new review email alerts

Yelp, which has raised $31 million in venture capital, continues to grow briskly. Comscore says they have 3.7 million unique monthly visitors; Compete says it’s more like 9 million.

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Yelp is also boasting some impressive stats: 8.3 million uniques in the past 30 days and over 2.3 million reviews (with the 1 million mark being reached on May 2007) (these are internal Google Analytics stats that the company shared with us). Yelp is in a competitive space with InsiderPages (acquired by Citysearch), and YellowBot. The real competition, though, will eventually be Google Local and Yahoo Local.

With this latest round, DAG joins previous investors Max Levchin ($1 million, Summer 2004), Bessemer Venture Partners ($5 million, Q4 2005), and Benchmark Capital ($10 million, Q4 2006). The company has now raised a total of $31 million. Revenues are rumored to be sub $10 million/year.

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The company says they are addressing the long tail of local services. The GenieTown site allows local service providers (plumbers, dentists, whatever) to put up a web presence. Users looking for providers can find them, based on their location and user rating.

The site competes on one end with services like (gulp) Google Local, Yahoo Local, Yelp and of course the Yellow Pages (both online and off). All of those services are great places to find local service providers.

Eventually GenieTown says they’ll integrate more closely with service providers to coordinate calendars and booking systems. At that point they’ll run into another group of competitors, including recently funded Liberysy.

If they are going to be successful in both carving out a niche and avoiding all those competitors, they’ll need to quickly get a lot of those service providers to start using their service. To concentrate their efforts they are rolling out the Bay Area only for now – service providers and users from anywhere can use the service, but the company will only market locally. They’ll grow from there.

And GenieTown is also trying to engage with users on more than just making introductions. The smartest part of the service, in my opinion, is a Q&A area that will do very will with search engine optimization.

The company has raised $2 million in a first round of funding from a number of angel investors, including Stanford professors Hassan Chafi (also the CEO) and Kunle Olukotun.

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Meanwhile, Google’s once-vaunted WiFi initiatives have dwindled down to providing free WiFi only in Mountain View, CA (where Google is headquartered). And Google’s biggest WiFi champion, Chris Sacca, is now gone. Google’s WiFi effort in San Francisco is all but dead, mostly because its partner, Earthlink, decided to get out of the municipal WiFi business.

So why does Meraki (and its new investors) think it can succeed where Google failed? Well, for one thing, it is already providing free WiFi to 40,000 people across two square miles of San Francisco. (With about 500 WiFi repeaters supporting them). It is simply expanding that program (to about 10,000 or 15,000 repeaters). Second, free municipal WiFi is not Meraki’s only business model (more on that below). It is using San Francisco basically as a giant demo for other cities. But, third and most important, its mesh technology is a cheaper way to blanket a city in wireless broadband than through standalone WiFi hotspots.

Meraki’s WiFi routers connect to each other through a mesh network, meaning that many can share a single broadband connection. They are cheap, can be placed outdoors on rooftops and balconies, and can even be solar-powered. The company expects that it will only cost a few million dollars to cover all of San Francisco, compared to the $14 to $17 million estimated for the Earthlink/Google plan. “There is a pretty drastic cost advantage,” says CEO Sanjit Biswas. “Our network will come in at the low, single-digit millions,” he predicts. Meraki will even offer residents free repeaters to amplify the WiFi signal inside their homes, and shoulder the entire cost itself rather than ask for public funds. All the routers will also be on private property, not public property, and thus avoid the politics of involving the city government.

Whether or not Meraki can prove that local ads will bring in enough money to cover its costs, though, is a different question. Meraki will show single-line text ads from Google that are localized as well as contextual ads from Yelp. Even Meraki CEO Biswas is not sure there is a big enough inventory of local ads to support an ad-driven model, but he sees the San Francisco deployment more as a showcase and as a test bed. “It helps us to have a live testbed with thousands of users,” he says, adding almost casually: “It would be cool to figure out an ad model.”

He is not being glib. Meraki’s real business opportunity is overseas with telecom companies in emerging countries like India and Brazil, who desperately want a cheap way to spread broadband and charge for it. Meraki makes a little bit of margin on its hardware (routers go from $49 to $199 each), but the real money is in managing large networks in partnership with telecom companies, where Meraki takes a 20 percent cut of the access fees they charge. The free WiFi in San Francisco might help build some buzz, but it is not going to spread anywhere else—unless those local ads start bringing in some real cash.

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Palo Alto based Trusted Opinion offers community based product ratings and recommendations in a social networking setting. The focus is on friends recommending things to friends, such as movies and DVD’s.

The company added support for Netflix queuing in July, allowing members to port recommendations into Netflix.

Trusted Opinion has dumped the awful logo Michael noted in February, and with a some-what better new look has grown to 350,000 registered members and is adding 3,000 new members a day.

Trusted Opinion’s service overlaps with a number of other social networks and other startups including Yelp and Flixster.

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Judy’s Book started off as a community driven review site for local businesses, but changed it’s focus in 2006 when the original model looked to be failing. The company de-focused on local reviews, and went more towards the shopping angle and local deals.

The assets of the company are being sold, and Sacks says the company is in discussions with a few interested parties.

Other players in the local review space have fallen in the last year, too. Intuit shut down Zipingo last summer, and Insider Pages sold for little more than the capital it originally raised to CitySearch.

Yelp is still standing and reportedly doing well, although fierce competition from Yahoo and Google as well as younger startups is looming. We sadly put Judy’s Book into the TechCrunch Deadpool.

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With GarageSeek users will be able to share their experiences with mechanics and rate them on several different metrics. When live, the site will provide a potentially very useful service, the ability to check reviews and avoid hiring a shoddy mechanic. However, while a complete database of real reviews is useful, a lot of review verticals don’t offer a real reason to contribute when they start and fragment reviews across multiple domain names users may not care to remember.

Yelp largely solved the chicken and egg problem that comes with user review services, even if they allegedly paid users for reviews to start. They raised over $16 million and generated traction on the service through having a system seeded with content, rewarding top users with over-the-top parties, and focusing on a service that a wide variety of people use frequently, restaurants. The other large people-driven review site, Insiderpages, had the advantage of $9 million in financing and starting back in 2004. Despite this, Insiderpages went through a slew of layoff and eventually sold off to CitySearch for $13 million.

Yelp is already in the auto repair category, and is poised to expose their audience to other review verticals as well. They’ve already moved into non-geographical service reviews such as media outlets. The one question these review verticals need to ask themselves is “Can niche vertical review sites survive up against one general review site, Yelp or otherwise”? My feeling is no.

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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.

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