The suspicions raised by some increasingly frequent (and frantic) voicemails left by Yelp ad salespeople for local businesses were borne out this week, when the crowdsourced ratings site announced first-quarter earnings that led to a far lower forecast for this year's revenue.

According to Bloomberg, "a wave of advertisers stopped spending with the online review guide in the first quarter," which caused analysts to fear for the company's long-term sustainability.

The company, which has long faced allegations of manipulation of reviews and aggressive if not outright shady sales tactics, has lost money even in quarters where revenue was good. But as of January, Yelp COO Jed Nachman said in an analyst call late Tuesday, ad buyers who'd been with the site for about a year started dropping off, in part because Yelp "started shifting the way it charged for ads," Bloomberg reports.

"The company began addressing the issue and was able to “course-correct” and saw better results in March and particularly in April," Bloomberg reports, which is about the same time missed calls from numbers associated with Yelp started mounting at the business I own, up from one or two a week to as many as four a day. (God bless Google Voice's "spam" function.) Other business owners I know reported the same phenomenon, with one local restauranteur who asked to remain anonymous saying that he's stopped picking up the phone during certain hours as "I know it'll be Yelp and I'm scared to piss them off."

MKM Partners analyst Rob Sanderson expressed skepticism at Yelp's assertion that they'd turned things around by March, saying "In a high-churn business, investors should rightfully ask that if retention issues were so easy to remedy in one to two months, then why was this not done at any time in the five years since IPO.”

After the company said late Tuesday that it had lowered its yearlong expectations from $880-$900 million to $865-$850 million, its stock dropped by 28 percent, Business Insider reports. Net revenue for the first quarter of 2017 was "$197.3 million, missing analyst estimates of $198.4 million," which actually doesn't sound that terrible. You can read their full Q1 earnings report here.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney seems dubious about the company's prospects, saying in a note that “There are now substantial questions about Yelp’s salesforce execution and its current value proposition for advertisers."

"Fundamentals are deteriorating,” he said. “This won’t be a quick fix.”

Related: New Study Links Yelp Ratings With SF Restaurant Closures

Twitter confirmed rumors Thursday that the company would be making significant staff cuts — cuts that are actually deeper than expected.

As previously reported, Bloomberg got early word that for the second year in a row, the beleaguered microblogging company would be making an eight percent staff cut. However, Twitter announced today that the layoffs would actually be a little larger, with nine percent of the workforce (about 350 people) heading to the chopping block.

“We have a clear plan, and we’re making the necessary changes to ensure Twitter is positioned for long-term growth,”CEO Jack Dorsey said via an email sent to staff before both the company's 4 a.m. PT earnings call and the announcement that the company would also be shuttering its video platform, Vine.

“The restructuring allows us to continue to fully fund our highest priorities, while eliminating investment in non-core areas and driving greater efficiency,” the company said in its letter to investors. (you can read the full investor report here

According to the Chron, the announced layoffs will hit the company's sales and marketing teams the hardest — a contrast from the layout round in 2015, which slashed staff in their engineering and product sectors.

In their quarterly earnings announcement, Twitter announced that their average monthly active users climbed 3 percent to 317 million during the third quarter, while average daily active usage increased 7 percent. Advertising revenue rose 6 percent to $545 million, with mobile advertising making up 90 percent of the total ad revenue. They posted a loss of $102.9 million, or 15 cents per share. They declined to give a revenue forecast for the fourth quarter or full year due to the cuts made in the sales department, the Associated Press reports.

These earnings are better than expected, everyone agrees, but analysts remain skeptical that Twitter's eggs haven't gone rotten. Apparent frustration over Dorsey's failure to usher in a buyer this fall (possibly due to their ineffectual abuse management) led one to write earlier this week that "We believe it is imperative for Mr. Dorsey to come on board full-time given his sway as a founder...If he's not willing to do so, then we argue Twitter needs to find someone else who will," CNet reports.

Twitter's "management appears unfocused and complacent, while the narrative has shifted to buyout rumors,” Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter said in a note to investors.

“Until Twitter is focused on attracting new users, driving increased use by its existing users, and demonstrating its value proposition to people who don't use the service, we expect it to grow very slowly. Its service is too complicated and difficult to use for the average Internet user despite multiple changes.”

And perhaps Dorsey hears those concerns, as in a statement today he said that “Our strategy is directly driving growth in audience and engagement, with an acceleration in year over-year growth for daily active usage, Tweet impressions, and time spent for the second consecutive quarter,”...“We see a significant opportunity to increase growth as we continue to improve the core service. We have a clear plan, and we’re making the necessary changes to ensure Twitter is positioned for long-term growth. The key drivers of future revenue growth are trending positive, and we remain confident in Twitter’s future.”

According to MarketWatch, news of the layoffs and better-than-expected earnings sent the stock soaring today, with 3.4% surge in premarket trade.

Previously: Twitter Is Cutting Vine, Which Will Be Discontinued

[UPDATE BELOW] Twitter is about to go public on the New York Stock Exchange (which opens at 9:30 a.m. Eastern/6:30 a.m. Pacific time). Shares are priced at $26, which values the company at $18 billion. "That makes Twitter worth more than many storied American corporations, like Alcoa and Harley-Davidson. At that valuation, each of Twitter’s 230 million users around the world is worth $78," claims Dealbook. Congratulations—our "FML" tweets are at least worth $0.00001 each!

The Wall Street Journal reports, "The short-messaging service's IPO is the biggest U.S. technology debut since Facebook Inc. last year. The deal is set to raise as much as $2.1 billion for the San Francisco-based company, which remains unprofitable but which has transformed public discussion on subjects from celebrities to public policy to pets. The price of $26 is available primarily to large investors such as mutual funds and hedge funds, as well as some of the individual clients of the banks underwriting the deal, led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc."

There's a lot of excitement on Wall Street—and it looks like some celebs will be on hand:

Reuters' Felix Salmon has some thoughts about Twitter and you:

So how is the individual investor supposed to navigate these treacherous waters? It’s actually incredibly easy. And it works like this. Twitter’s profits, if and when they ever appear, are going to be some fraction of its revenues. Its revenues, in turn, are going to be some fraction of the value it provides to its users. I have personally already extracted many thousands of dollars in value out of Twitter, over the past five years, and it hasn’t cost me a penny. On an ROI basis, I’m doing unbelievably well — and my returns are only going to keep on growing into the future.

Here’s my advice, then: take the amount of money you were thinking of investing in Twitter, and divide it by the rate at which you value your own time. So, if you were going to invest $5,000 and you value your time at $50 per hour, then you’d end up with a figure of 100 hours. Then, instead of spending the $5,000 on Twitter stock, spend 100 hours on Twitter: the cost is the same. The value you get from being on Twitter — from interacting with people you admire, from learning new things, from being able to express yourself so easily and concisely — will be much greater than the value you’d ever get from buying $5,000 of Twitter stock. And you’ll still have $5,000 left over to do whatever you want with, whether it’s putting it into some other investment or spending it on something awesome — a holiday, perhaps, or a gift to a friend, or even some fine wine.

Update 6:50 a.m.: The opening bell has rung but Twitter has still not officially begun trading. Here is a Vine of the Twitter people ringing the bell, which we found on Twitter.

BuzzFeed reporter Mariah Summers has been live-tweeting the experience from the floor of the stock exchange. She says the reporters look as bored as the traders, and some newcomers to the trading floor "are upset there's no physical bell in sight, but there is a hashtag for one so..."

Update 7 a.m.: Patrick Stewart tells CNBC that Twitter "has become one of the most significant aspects of my life and my career." Anyone can play King Lear, but only Twitter can inspire a man to dress up as a lobster and lie in a bathtub for LULZ.

Update 7:10 a.m.: Sources tell Reuters that Twitter's offering is quite "oversubscribed," meaning would-be investors have requested to buy 30 times the number of shares that are being put on offer. The sources said "ten institutional investors received 50 percent of the deal, with about 750 accounts getting less than 10,000 shares." Meanwhile, outside Twitter HQ:

While we wait for trading to begin and contemplate the utter meaninglessness of all this, here's the little girl who rang the bell:

Update 7:47 a.m.: Still waiting... still waiting. The consensus appears to be this is not a delay—trading was not expected to begin until after 10:45 EST. In the meantime, here's a stellar photo of the hungry, drooling capitalists waiting for their fresh meat to drop:

Update 7:55 a.m.: IT'S TRADING! IT'S TRADING! TWTR opened at a trading price of $45.10, up 80% from that initial number of $26 per share. Twitter just made some people billionaires #LOL. There were no technical glitches inside the clown car as it plunged into the goldmine.

The first Twitter trade at $45.10 values company at $31.6 billion. (via @ScottCohnCNBC) $TWTR

— CNBC (@CNBC) November 7, 2013

Bay Area-based Peet's Coffee's stock got a jolt (ahem) this morning after the company announced that Germany conglomerate Benckiser will buy the coffee/tea company for a bold $977.6 million. Peet's, founded in 1966, competes with Seattle-based Starbucks, though many (rightfully) consider the former to be vastly superior to the latter. (FWIW, unlike most local artisan roasters, like Blue Bottle, et al., Peet's will also make you an iced espresso.)

The deal should close in around three months. According to New York Times, "Once it is completed, Peet's will be privately-held and will still be run by its current management team. It will remain based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with its headquarters in Emeryville, California." Shortly after the news, shares of Peet's this morning jumped from $73.70 to $74.25 in morning trading on Nasdaq.

Started by Alfred Peet in the '60s, Peet's began as a single-store joint along Berkeley's esteeemed "Gourmet Ghetto" near Chez Panisse and the University of California at Berkeley. The company now operates an estimated 190 cafes throughout the U.S. with kiosks at major airports. They also sell beans at most major grocery stores.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus is funny. Why? Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, he wants his early employees to return some of the stock they own before the company's initial public offering. With games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, the San Francisco-based company grew. Grew big. Billions of dollars big. However, now Pincus some of that sweet-nectar stock back.

FOX News reports:

Early last year, as Pincus began preparing to take Zynga public, he and several other executives decided the company had doled out too many stock rights to certain people in its early days, say people familiar with the matter. The executives chose an unusual solution: They began demanding that certain employees surrender some shares or be fired.

Those shares matter as Zynga approaches an initial public offering, expected this year, that could value it at close to $20 billion and make holders of large blocks of stock wealthy.

Good grief.

Offering loads of stock options is de rigeur for many Silicon Valley startups. As AP notes, "The promise of a big payout is what gets a lot of people working long hours with little compensation early in a startup's life."

WSJ cited an unnamed source with regard to Pincus' "giver's remorse."

UPDATE: Pincus also benefitted greatly from the San Francisco's tax break after demanding it from the city in March.

Lonely this Valentine's Day? Run out and find the nearest Apple stock holder, reserve a table at Gary Danko, leave your underwear at home, and plan on putting out. A lot. Because these guys are having the most profitable quarter ever. According to Associated Press, "The iPhone's rollout in several major new markets, including China and South Korea, helped fuel the company's nearly 50 percent jump in net income over the same period a year earlier." Revenue also reached an all-time high, leaping an astounding 32 percent. What's more, "Apple's numbers for the three months ended Dec. 26 reflect the company's ability to allure shoppers without deep cuts to its premium prices." (No kidding. The MacBook, however, is now available for a not-nearly-as-expensive-but-still-very-pricey-for-commoners $999.) This all comes on the heels of this week's iPad (iTablet? iRule? iGod?) announcement, happening on Wednesday, 1/27.

Though not nearly as important as Rachel Zoe (obvi), Apple CEO Steve Jobs is facing some of the same criticism as Hollywood's most stylish heroine, namely his pin-thin stature. "I probably need to gain about 30 pounds," Steve Jobs told the New York Times after his Norma Desmond-like comeback at yesterday's iPod Nano reveal. And, yes, for better or for worse, Jobs looked rail-thin. But the reaction on Wall Street, where Apple stock ebbs and flows depending on Jobs' perceived health, is the reaction that matters. Valleywag pointed out today, "Such is the demanding CEO's importance to Apple, and shareholders must now weigh Jobs' still-gaunt look and scratchy voice against his characteristically enthusiastic delivery." Did anyone attend yesterday's Jobsian revival? If so, how did he sound?