It's a shame about Yelp. A great product with truly valuable content, entirely stagnant.<p>For one thing, it's awful for discovery of new places. Want to find a high-rated restaurant near you that serves a specific dish? Well, have a good time wading through random crap entirely unrelated to that. My favorite recently was searching for ice cream and getting a <i>hospital</i>, because someone's review mentioned how the cafeteria <i>didn't have any</i>.<p>Beyond that, what's the point of contributing all this content to Yelp? The value of the site remains constant whether you review zero businesses or 100. Back to discovery, Yelp is working with an enormous corpus of data at this point. You're telling that we can't compare my review behavior against others who've reviewed the same spots and shake out a few recommendations? Users and businesses both would really benefit from this.<p>You could even make things more interesting for more accomplished users, handicapping individual restaurant scores based on past review behavior.<p>It's a great tool for vetting if a restaurant you've already discovered is actually any good. But when you look at all the unique opportunities it has to really redefine how people find and choose food and other businesses, it's hard not to shake your head and sigh.<p>I discovered Yelp when I moved to the Bay Area nearly two years ago. The product has only plateaued in that time, while my opinion of it has steadily eroded thanks to its flaky search boning me during mobile food quests. Don't even get me started about its obnoxious nagging in the mobile app to get you to use social features.<p>Is it really worthwhile for investors to buy part of a company with a mostly bi-coastal, American userbase whose product's best days seem to be behind it? Is it just a "Hey, invest in us, we're kinda Groupon-y because we make money from local businesses" kind of thing?
Yelp does not have a powerful network effect like Facebook, its main distribution mechanism was SEO via Google search. Unlike Google+/Facebook, in this case Google is in an excellent position to compete, if they smartly integrate a mix of user-written and Zagat reviews into Android and iPhone maps (it will take a better product manager than Marissa Mayer though- so the outcome is highly internal politics dependent)