Social websites face transparency questions

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Yelp.com prides itself on being a site where people can write reviews about pretty much anything and connect with similarly critical peers. Yet as the site grows, some of the businesses scrutinized on Yelp are turning the tables and griping about the company itself.

The complaints highlight an irony for websites that stimulate online communities and let users speak their minds. As the sites make the world more transparent, giving people the power to discuss everything from a great pizza to a bad date, the sites' own transparency is often questionable, as consumers and businesses struggle to understand how they operate.

This tug of war has become increasingly public with the explosive popularity of social websites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, as well as niche sites like Yelp, which has more than 5 million reviews on establishments in dozens of cities.

Properly balancing the interests of various constituencies — and retaining their loyalty, perhaps through improved channels of communications — will prove key to whether the sites can grow into vibrant, moneymaking operations for years to come.

Many sites have expanded so fast that explanations about what they are doing often come late — after their users have had plenty of time to air complaints. Facebook has felt such growing pains, and now Yelp is, too.

One big gripe from businesses that get reviewed on Yelp is that they don't quite get how it works.

For instance, some wonder why users' reviews can seemingly mysteriously disappear from Yelp's pages about a business.

This irks Leslie Tagorda, owner of a San Francisco-based Web design company, Flair-Designs. She has noticed reviews vanish from the Flair-Designs page on Yelp over the past two years. This worries her because the more reviews she has, the more calls she gets from potential clients, she said.

When she first noticed reviews disappearing, Tagorda contacted clients who had written the comments, to see whether they had deleted them. They said they had not.