By Bonnie Ruberg
For anybody who’s new to the Bay Area, or who just wants to check up on a business before stepping foot in the door, Yelp.com is invaluable. With 25,000 listings in San Francisco alone, the site lets customers post public reviews of everything from the restaurants they love to the tattoo parlors they hate to the gyms that creep them out. Yelp’s selling point: it’s all about what you, the consumer, have to say. Readers get pure, unadulterated public opinion -- not trumped
The balance of power on Yelp is about to get a shake-up. The San Francisco consumer review Web site blasted out an email to its Elite Squad today with the news: business owners will be allowed to publicly post their response to Yelp reviews in as early as a
week.
The e-mail solicited the Yelpers' feedback, and as could be expected, they started reviewing the change in policy on the site's talk threads within minutes. The response was indifferent to positive: "It should be interesting to see