Foursquare was one of the first companies to offer incentives for checking in to venue partners. SCVNGR and Facebook copied off of Foursquare’s business model and now Yelp is jumping on board too. Yelp is now offering business owners “Check-in Offers” to venues.

Yelp has launched deals for their check-in service. This is similar to what Facebook recently started offering and the business that Foursquare has been working on for a long time now. Now when you check into venues using the Yelp mobile application, you will see coupons and deals.

According to a TechCrunch source, Yelp was in the final stages of selling to Google for $550 million. But then Yahoo! came along and made an offer to buy out Yelp for $750 million. Yelp had their investment bank ask Google if they wanted to match Yahoo!

Yelp’s core service is reviews that people leave about local businesses. Local businesses with the best reviews on Yelp tend to have higher revenues as well. Now local businesses are starting to offer Yelp-only deals for customers. “Historically, we have provided value to our 36 million monthly unique visitors by helping them find a great local business when they need a product or service,” stated Yelp’s Director of Local Business Marketing. “As you will see today in San Diego, and soon in other cities, we have been working with some of the best local businesses — as identified by the Yelp community — to highlight some great deals for our users.” [Yelp Blog]

The new Yelp iPhone application is going to compete with Foursquare head-on.  According to a company blog post, Yelp will have virtual badges and a royalty hierarchy similar to the Mayor concept on Foursquare too.  Yelp hierarchy includes the Duke, Duchess, Baron, and King of specific venues.  Yelp submitted this version of the app for approval recently. [Yelp Blog via Mashable]

Yelp is integrating OpenTable’s reservation system into restaurant profiles. The OpenTable reservation can only be viewed by registered users viewing participating restaurants. OpenTable currently works with about 11,000 restaurants.

Yelp has announced some major changes to their services. Yelp will now allow anyone to view reviews that were previously hidden by the automated filter. Yelp is also getting rid of the “Favorite Review” feature that is being sold to advertisers.

Yelp’s automated filter was created to prevent showing fake or malicious reviews. However the automated filter also caused legitimate reviews to be hidden. Yelp’s favorite review feature was sold by Yelp to establishments to showcase what people like best about them.

“Today we’ve taken steps to make it even more clear that Yelp treats review content equally for advertisers and non-advertisers alike and that there is no relationship between advertising and a business’ reviews on Yelp,” stated Yelp CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman. “While Yelp is helping millions of consumers find millions of great local businesses each month–and consumer traffic and business advertisers continue to reach new highs–myths have persisted about how review content is displayed on Yelp.” [CNET]

Yelp and Epipheo Studios worked together on a video that explains how the filtering process works. Yelp has a reputation to protect as they are facing lawsuits that involve extortion. Below is a video of how it works: