Social Web sites face transparency questions.

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.

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.

She e-mailed Yelp and was directed to the business owners' section of
the site. Not satisfied, she aired her issues by writing a review of
Yelp itself on Yelp's business page, giving the site two out of a
possible five stars.

She wrote that although she likes using Yelp as a consumer, as a
business owner "Yelp just about `sucks it.'"

At last she got a more personal message from Yelp's chief executive
and co-founder, Jeremy Stoppelman. He explained that consumer reviews
may be removed by an automated program that is designed to filter out
reviews the site considers untrustworthy, such as sniping that a
pizzeria owner might write about a competitor.

Tagorda was satisfied with Stoppelman's response but still wanted people to