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I've chatted a little bit about Yelp.com in the past, but a recent article in San Francisco magazine really brought a lot of things home. While I'm not a tremendous fan of SF Mag, this article was quite good and a read I would recommend. Basically, the author asks, what is the future of Yelp? The site works somewhat well in San Francisco, but expansion is a problem. I would posit that the problem lies in the fact that the only other annoying hipster population of any merit lies in New York City and that is a territory heavily covered in all things hipster-related, Vice being one of the more amusing ones. So, expanding a lot in NYC is a heavy fight, while any other city doesn't have much of a market worth pursuing. San Francisco happened to be the best mix of everything and they're pretty much the kings here.       But the fact is that Yelp is probably doomed to failure or a buyout. The site is just too cool for school and has no generic merit to it that allows it to spread beyond the "in" crowd of any particular city. It's part of the reason that while I review on it from time to time, it's gotten to be only useful to me as an online 411 directory. Even if an establishment doesn't have a website in SF, they will probably be listed on Yelp. Beyond that, the reviews are nearly worthless to me, unless of course some place gets insanely good reviews all the time, then I know I should stay away as it will be thronged by hipster masses constantly.       I mean, yeah, we get it, Tartine is great. The 1,000 reviews that are there for it are kinda redundant at this point. But that's the problem. To get in to the crowd, you need to review and to be welcomed by the crowd, you need to love what they love and hate what they hate. Step out of line and the "Yelp Elite" will not welcome you unless of course you can out-drink them and I gotta warn everything that there are some severe fishes in that group.       One last point that I've mentioned in passing to people and the author of the SF Mag article picked up is that it seems like a Google buyout would make a lot of sense. Once I saw that Google had put ratings on its business listings, it seemed like a perfect fit. That and the fact that Yelp's revenue comes from premium placements for business (which several owners have told me are a waste of money) and advertisements, which Google does splendidly. What Yelp could do for Google's ratings system could be what YouTube did for Google Video. I'm sure they wouldn't change anything about the front end of Yelp so that they keep the community that drools over it in place, while at the same time, they'd take the backend and make it all Google, hopefully fixing Yelp's very sporadic image server in the process. After all, Yelp's search system sucks to the core and I always use 'blah blah restaurant site:yelp.com' searches on Google to actually find what I'm looking for, so the fit would be more brilliant than a shotgun with a silencer