Chili's always scores 5 stars. (Photo: Yelp)

There are plenty of struggling writers in the city looking for a few extra dollars, so someone has smartly devised a plan to use their skills and to game the very legitimate review system on Yelp. As discovered by Eater, a posting on Craigslist (in New York's writing/editing jobs section, natch) is hiring people for $25 to write "well-written" reviews on the complaint outpost website for the restaurants suffering with poor scores. In addition to having the penmanship of Frank Bruni, interested writers are required to have 50 reviews in their profile.

The post instructs that you’ll use your words on restaurants that are "mostly positive 4's and 5's but a couple unfiltered 1's dragging them down, either from competitors or disgruntled ex-staff." For an extra $25, you can "cut and paste the same review onto a couple other social media websites." There's your chance to finally be popular on Citysearch!

Eater notes that the underground market for fake Yelp reviews is lucrative. They dug up emails from a totally real "reputation management firm" that charges restaurants $500 to increase their social media scores on review sites that your parents use, like Urbanspoon, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.

We're waiting for the Sunday Styles piece on millennials writing Yelp reviews to pay their college loans.

(H/T Eater)

Looks like someone has quality Yelp reviews! (Photo: flickr.com/foundingfarmers)

Did you pick your Sunday afternoon brunch spot based on Yelp reviews? If a recent study is any indication, you have plenty of company. The Guardian reports that two Berkeley economists have decided to quantify the impact of your glowing Yelp review on that Thai place down the street. The results:

They found that a restaurant with a rating improved by just half a star – on a scale of 1 to 5 – was much more likely to be full at peak dining times.

Indeed, an extra half-star rating caused a restaurant's 7pm bookings to sell out on from 30% to 49% of the evenings it was open for business.

That's irrespective of changes in price or quality. So next time you're considering a wrathful review of the local bagel joint and wondering whether it'll make any difference, the answer is yes.

To us, that sounds like a big, glaring incentive to game the system. That inspires the question of whether any of these reviews can really be trusted. Nor is this question mere cynicism. Just last weekend, the New York Times ran a lengthy piece about the business of online book reviews, featuring an energetic entrepreneur who found himself banking tens of thousands of dollars by selling his services as an enthusiast. One expert estimates that a full third of online reviews are, basically, complete B.S.

The study's authors don't sound too bothered by the notion, though:

"These returns suggest that restaurateurs face incentives to leave fake reviews, but a rich set of robustness checks confirm that restaurants do not manipulate ratings in a confounding, discontinuous manner."

However, it's probably worth noting one little detail about the study's methodology: The data crunched comes from 328 restaurants in the San Francisco area. We can't help but wonder if that's a population unusually swayed by the wisdom of the crowds.

Seemed like a cat pic kind of day. (Photo: Pusheen.com)

Two more execs are leaving Yahoo. Call it the "Mayer effect." Or is that the term for bringing Googlers to Yahoo? [AllThingsD]

The social media sector has LinkedIn and Yelp to thank for boosting its image by meeting their projected revenues. The rest of y'all look like chumps. [Wall Street Journal]

Hey everyone let's freak out and say you can't read Quora anonymously. But psst...you can. Just change your settings. Problem solved! [GigaOm]

Au revoir, piracy police. At least in France, anyway. [PaidContent]

Yes, you can go to jail for admitting to rape on Reddit. Also, you're a monster. [BuzzFeed]

(Photo: Top News)

Marissa Mayer is reportedly getting straight to work Googlifying Yahoo. She officially made the food in the Valley HQ free again, much to the delight of the company's starving engineers. [AllThingsD]

Speaking of Ms. Mayer, Dave McClure thinks she should focus on transforming Yahoo into a female-oriented company. Unfortunately, he called his blog post on the idea, "Pink is the new Purple." [500 Hats]

Craigslist is stifling innovation by suing PadMapper. [New York Times]

Companies actually listen to your online reviews. Rejoice, asshole Yelpers! [Wall Street Journal]

Presented without comment: "Mr. Blodget now presides over Business Insider from a makeshift standing desk in the middle of a 50-person newsroom in New York, where he barks questions ("Is it cool?" "Can we clip that video?") at his reporters." [WSJ]

Oh what, you wanna see my price range?

Now that Groupon tested the IPO waters and found them warm enough (stock dropped 4.8 percent, but is currently trading at $23.70), Yelp is ready to wade on in.

Earlier this week the online crowd-sourced consumer review company tapped Goldman Sachs and Citigroup as the bookrunners for its IPO. Today the Wall Street Journal reports that Yelp is planning a public offering that would value the company between $1 billion and $2 billion.

Yelp, which makes money by selling ads to local businesses and big brands, has been held back by the size of its sales force.  A firm called Next Up Research pegged Yelp's revenue at only $100 million by 2012. By contrast, much of Facebook's $1.6 billion in revenue comes from ad sales buoyed by its sales staff.

However, Yelp has done well in the mobile sphere. Its apps are on the most downloaded list for both iPhones and iPads. And as of August, says the Journal, Yelp had more than 63 million monthly visitors. As we noted this morning, mobile ads are poised to become a huge market.

The other factor at play is the effect of Google's latest moves--including acquiring Zagats and launching Google+ Pages. Not to mention the impending IPO of Angie's List, a Yelp rival, which had $62.6 million in revenue for just the first nine months of 2011.

While you contemplate Yelp's chances in the public markets, let us not forget its contribution to American literature. For example, Ernest Hemingway, Yelper, as imagined by Alex Buckley:

Zorba Express Mediterranean Café
Category: Greek
FOUR STARS

It was a cold night and the rain was coming down hard and I did not want to move from my couch. I called Zorba Express and a man came with a gyro in a greasy paper bag. I paid him and he left. The gyro was good and it felt good to eat in front of the television and out of the rain. I fell asleep between the couch cushions and when I woke up the next day the paper bag was still there on the floor.

Cat that swallowed the startup canary. (via Flickr)

If you haven't gotten the memo, Mayor Bloomberg is uber-amped about the tech scene. Look over here folks, nothing to see at Zuccotti Park!

Not only has El Bloombito been stopping by tech meetups and demo days, but he's also christening techie offices. After all, "We just want to change the world" is an easier industry to get behind than "Hey, thanks for that bailout."

This morning, Mayor Bloomberg and "head nerd" Rachel Sterne, fresh off her Vogue profile, swung by Yelp's new East Coast headquarters, stationed in Union Square (for maximum local tech cred). According to AM New York, Yelp's office will house 65 full-time employees, including 20 new ones, including local and brand sales execs plus marketing. (When Valley giants come out East, they tend to bring the sales and marketing side more than the engineers.)

NYC Digital proudly displayed the Mayor's statements on its Tumblr:

“Yelp’s new office is the latest proof that New York gets five stars as a home of growing and innovative tech companies,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “But we’re working hard to create jobs not only in the tech sector, but also among the small businesses - from restaurants to hardware stores to auto shops - that Yelp users review.”

Small and nimble. Someone's catching onto the feel good, anti-corporate rhetoric fast. He even left a review of Yelp...on Yelp.

But while we appreciate the mix-and-match options of picking certain subway lines or choosing more walking over transfers, those features were always there. Finding nearby restaurants and bars still looks cleaner and takes less clicks on a Google map. And if we were going to rent a vehicle, it would be via ZipCar, not Hertz.

In the age of data mining and transparency, however, HopStop has stepped up its marketing efforts by borrowing a page from that other local trend-spotter, OkCupid. The Awl recently referred to co-founder Christian Rudder as "that guy from that dating site who is so good at getting publicity." Betabeat got an email yesterday from a HopStop rep who promised a series "digging into our data and publishing reports on New York trends." The first one uses subway data to figure out if we're really a Yankees or a Mets town, although the results are less than scientific. Now if only there was a way to tie New Yorker's transportation choices to their sexual habits, we're sure their blog traffic would skyrocket.

Mr. Meyer

For all those start-ups rushing to be first-to-market, let HopStop be a lesson. Being the first to plant your flag won't necessarily keep it there, especially when Google comes stomping in. Six years after it launched, HopStop announced a massive transformation Monday, morphing the navigation service, which also has an iPhone and Android app, into some Web 2.0 Frankenstein of local reviews, daily deals, and real-time directions thanks to partnerships with Yelp, Groupon, Zvents, Hertz, and Limos.com. Betabeat talked to CEO Joe Meyer, former VP & GM for AOL's Quigo Technologies (once run by Hashable's Mike Yavonditte), about the revamp and how Hopstop is “holding our own against the giant.”

You've been facing competition for awhile. Why transition now?

It’s an extension that we probably should have made earlier than we did. We’re already very, very good at serving geo-targeted ads based on people’s searches, most of those ads are promoting a local venue, so it made sense to bring highly- localized content as well as monetary transactional-type opportunities into our user experience. But not to do it in such a way where we’re trying to do what other best-of-breed companies are doing, but instead partner with best-of-breed companies.

You say you should have "made it earlier." I remember when HopStop first came out, I started using it right away and sent it to all my friends . . .

We appreciate that by the way, you’re one of many.

But since then I’ve gotten an iPhone and I end up using Google Transit. It’s not just them, there are other apps in New York. When did you start seeing a loss in market share from that competition?

We actually haven’t seen a loss in market share. I think Google’s entrance into the pedestrian navigation space has shed more of a light on this market and legitimized it. We invented this category, five, going on six years ago. We had a fairly big first-mover advantage in it. In fact, lot of people “hop stop it” to where they need to go. We've only seen growth in core business since Google entered the space and they have not taken share away from us, they’ve actually grown the pie larger.

That’s really surprising to hear--just because of Google’s market penetration in search and mobile.

To tell you the truth, it’s a little bit surprising to me. We introduced an iPhone app two, two and half  years ago and we’ve been in the top ten iPhone app in the navigation category of iTunes ever since. We average 1,500 downloads a day ever since with no marketing. We introduced an Android app less than six months ago and we’re in the top 30, top 40 app in the local travel category, averaging close to 2,000 downloads a day. And then mobile web generates more traffic than both of our apps combined.

But do you have any data on whether people are using it? Because its one of the first apps I downloaded too, but I don’t end up using it because it’s so easy to use Google.

I look at pageviews and searches, that tells me if people are using the app and the growth on our mobile side is extremely, extremely strong. We have many more users than we had one or two years ago.

So you’re growing, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not losing market share.

If Google never entered the category, would we grow more? Would we grow less? It’s completely hypothetical. You could say we would grow less because there wouldn’t be as much awareness and adoption.

But purely market share?

Does Google do more searches on Google map that Hopstop does? Uh, absolutely. Does Google do more Google Transit searches that Hopstop does in the markets in which we overlap? I think that’s debatable to tell you the truth. I think Google Transit does more pedestrian routing searches than Hopstop because they’re in 450 markets and we're in 60. But in the markets in which we overlap, especially the markets in which we’ve been in for more than two years, I would venture to guess that it’s not too dissimilar.

Is your revenue all ad-supported?

We’re a platform so we also power directions on other sites, thousands of them. Some of them are licensing, some are affiliates, some are rev-shares.

What’s monetizable in the new partnerships?

They each take different shapes and forms.  For example with Yelp, we’re not paying them any money, they’re not paying us any money. But they’re bringing highly-localized content on our site and we are monetizing that content by hosting those pageviews, but we also send traffic to Yelp at a certain point in the user experience.

What happens when Google wants to partner with Yelp?

That's not going to happen. Yelp already said no to the acquisition, so they invented Google Places. Groupon said no to the acquisition, so they're coming out with coupons.

Google Places is a mess but is there anything you think that you do better than Google Transit? For example, they vastly underestimate subway transit time. It’s really annoying.

Here’s what I know for a fact. We ingest more data on a per-market basis than Google. So Google only ingests transit data that comes to them on a normalized feed-like manner. Which means that any transit data that doesn’t give Google their data in the exact format that Google insists upon it, Google doesn’t take in that data. In the New York Tri-state area, we ingest data from over 40 different transit agencies, not just the MTA. Google does it from less than ten.

Another differentiator is that we give users  many more opportunities to slice-and-dice a search down to the exact route. People are very particular about how they want to travel, they want a specific mode of transportation, a specific vehicle, a specific line, more transfers, less transfers, more walking, less walking. We think we perfected it in this new tool launched yesterday called the Search Optimizer.

How would you convince someone like me to switch back from Google transit to Hopstop?

I would say give it a try and if you like what you see you’re going to continue using it. And if you don’t tell us what you don’t like and we’ll improve upon it. We actually listen to our end-users. Every single message that gets into our company, we respond to in 24 hours.