Friend of SFist Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp's CEO and co-founder, just shot us this note: "Guns drawn in front of Yelp office..."...

We enjoy Yelp quite a bit. During our rare moments of free time, we often have fun slogging through the site's multitudes of oft-useful, oft-comedic opinions on local services, establishments, and especially restaurants (feel free to check out our vast [6] amount of reviews ). We were interested to hear more about the genesis of this community-based Web site, and wondered how Yelp's growth and evolution looked to those behind the scenes. The site's founders, Jeremy Stoppelman (who's the CEO, and talked to SFist once before) and Russel Simmons (the CTO), took a few minutes to answer three questions for us. Hey -- six answers for the price of three!...

We had already been pretty fascinated with the growing trend of online user reviews lately. Then last week, the Chronicle came out with an article on "amateur" food blogs and restaurant reviews, about which SFist Jeremy posted an awesome rant, prompting some great dialog in the comments. This further prompted us to ponder how much online user reviews affect, and reflect, our own daily consumeristic lives....

When we at SFist are confronted with questions from visitors to our fair city on how to avoid the touristy stuff and live like the locals do, we bite back our first response ("Step in dog crap on way to Muni, curse dog owner. Muni is delayed/late, curse Muni. Repeat daily"), and send them over to local resident review/recommendation site yelp. And, hey, we even use yelp ourselves -- either to get recommendations or......