Site visitors are encouraged to sign up and add a profile that boasts personal details from their photo to their favorite books. Like MySpace and Facebook, users can link to one another as "friends" and post comments for the world to see. The site offers personal messaging, forums, maps, user-created lists and various other features familiar to members of social networking sites.

The flipside to these pluses is that the site will likely not attract a user beyond this age group. After all, what 40-year-old really wants to read a review about a boxing studio where the reviewer admits to not being sober at the time? (Yes, this is an actual review.)

The user interface, which is fairly well organized and easy to navigate, is perhaps Yelp's biggest strength. (It's interesting to note that the site launched from a Mac with Firefox has overlapping and oddly sized text. Clearly the site has not been tested for all browsers, despite being founded by engineers.) But the Yelp name sounds "dotcom bubble" at best, and the company logo won't be winning any design awards.

The company doesn't rely solely on the Net to keep users interested. It regularly hosts local "scene" parties in hubs like San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Chicago, inviting all the beautiful people.

Time magazine gave its own approval of the company, adding it to its "7 Coolest Sites to Bookmark" in August this year, a few days after CNET named it the best site for students. That same month, Yelp and Palm announced a partnership for local searches on its Treo handheld mobile phone and PDA.

It remains to be seen, however, whether a fickle demographic embrace Yelp and help it grow like MySpace, if the site end up on the scrap heap like countless casualties of the dotcom bubble bursting.