We ourselves haven't yet jumped into writing our own user reviews, but we love to read other people's. In recent times, we have checked out the forums at Steve's Digicams when we were buying a digital camera(s) (we left the first one at Dolores Park and later bought the upgraded version, which quickly became old news a few months later), the Netflix member reviews for new titles to add to our queue, and Trip Advisor when we were recently searching for a good hotel for our family's upcoming visit to the city. (We ended up going with Hotel Fusion for the majority of our family, and Astoria Hotel for the die-hard smokers who just couldn't bare staying in a non-smoking room.)

For everything else, we Yelp. Yelp.com has been at the forefront of our fascination with like-minded people who happen to keep good records of where they've been, whether they liked it, and every detail they can think of in between. (Read Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman's SFist interview from last year.) Yelp reviews are very entertaining but sometimes pretty over-the-top. We're good at deciphering the legitimate ones from those with hidden agendas, but we do find ourselves often shunning businesses that get less than 3.5 stars. This is a bit unsettling since we've found that a few decent places that we had frequented before reading Yelp didn't always get the best ratings. So, we're left wondering, how much does Yelp.com effect—and reflect—our daily, consumeristic lives?

After the cut: Just for fun, we examine the businesses we've frequented that have garnered the most interesting reviews. All in all, Yelp rarely does us wrong.