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Verizon and Yelp

March 27th, 2009 | Category: Politics, making millions

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So there are some updates on things that I posted earlier:

Credo Mobile: When I told someone I had Credo Mobile instead of a huge telecom wireless phone plan this person said “I have Verizon because it has the best network”.  The thing is that wireless coverage is not a big issue in the places I go and I don’t care about it enough to get into a pissing contest over it.  What I do care about is this:  It turns out that Verizon wireless blocked a bunch of text messages on its network because they were pro choice text messages.  So Verizon may or may not have a better network, but they definitely censor your speech (later on Verizon would backpedal on this after it got a lot of bad press on it).  And just to bring things around full circle, Ivan Siedenberg, CEO of Verizon, made financial contributions to Ted Stevens who helped me name this blog.  Looking over his contribution list is interesting since he mainly supports Republicans but there are some Democrats on the list.

Yelp:  I’m still waiting to see what yelp does to respond to the updated criticiscm about extortion (see my updated yelp post).  I emailed them asking for a response (nothing yet) and their official blog still does not have any response.  The CEOs twitter page didn’t mention it last I checked (when the initial story broke he had a lot to say on his twitter page).

3 comments

3 Comments so far

  1. Danno April 5th, 2009 8:29 am

    OK, so I admit I’m totally obsessed with this story. Mainly because it seems like the Yelp CEO and/or salespeople are douchebags. And I like to see people like that getting their comeuppance.

    Also, there’s a blurb from SFist on how the Yelp reviews on Yelp have started skewing more negatively lately:

    http://sfist.com/2009/04/02/yelps_yelp_reviews_mixed.php

  2. Mark April 7th, 2009 9:42 am

    I got a response! So I both emailed yelp and posted a 1 star review of yelp. The email to yelp got a canned response that said “we already responded to this…please see the CEO’s blog postings on the subject. My 1 star review of yelp actually got a response from Jeremy himself. He stated:
    Hi Mark,

    We already thoroughly responded.
    http://officialblog.ye...

    My problem with the initial story wasn’t the anonymous sources, there are verifiable claims you can check for yourself.

    Jeremy

    This is a similar response as the email but it is with the CEO himself. I decided to respond to Jeremy since he is higher up in the food chain at the company. The following is my reply to Jeremy:

    Hi Jeremy,

    East Bay Express has an update to their initial story (please see http://www.eastbayexpress.com/news/yelp_extortion_allegations_stack_up/Content?oid=946025). In it they did not use anonymous sources. Since this update from east bay express clears up your major concern with the initial article, can you respond to the updated claims from east bay express regarding the named sources that yelp participates in extortion and regularly removes postings. Also saying that the algorithm for postings is proprietary decreases the confidence that users have that yelp is being fair and open it its business practices and only helps further the claims made by names sources in the east bay express’ updated article.

    Thanks,
    Mark

    We’ll see if he responds :)

  3. Mark April 7th, 2009 2:50 pm

    ok I got yet another response from Jeremy. I’m going to write another post since there is a lot to copy and paste here.

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