User reviews, like comic book superpowers, can be used for Great Good or Great Evil. I’ve always tried my best to keep my reviews fair and, in some cases, have opted to not Yelp if I really didn’t have something good to say. (A number of my friends and family own small businesses, so I guess I am especially sympathetic to their struggles!)

I’ve been lucky enough that, as an Elite Yelper for four years, a few of my reviews have been deemed worthy enough for Boston-area “Review of the Day.”

There’s one review I’m particularly proud of that I’m sure will never gain that distinction, but as of yesterday it gained the best unintended praise I could ever have hoped for.

On a whim in 2008 I wrote a review for the church I grew up in, the Transfiguration Greek Orthodox Church in Lowell, Massachusetts. My parents took me to this church during all my formative years, almost every Sunday and every holiday without fail. I will always have a fondness for this church as my second childhood home, and I wanted to pay tribute to it, especially since it holds an amazing, beautiful secret:

It is one of the most ornate and beautiful Orthodox churches ever made. Wall-to-dome, it is covered in handmade glass and gold mosaic Byzantine iconography. My review goes into detail about this — you can read it here. My home church is a treasure of Byzantine art and you’d never know it from looking at it from the outside. It’s located in a rough neighborhood of Lowell, and the exterior yellow brick is rather unassuming.

Apparently someone from my home church found my review on Yelp (or they found it via their daughter — I’m still not entirely sure), and from there things spread like wildfire — the link was passed around to the current Transfiguration priest and then on to the iconographer himself, whose work I can’t praise enough.

From there, someone dug around the church records and found my father’s contact information, and a thank-you phone call was sent his way. (Of course, my dad had absolutely no idea about Yelp, let alone my review on there, but he knows his daughter well enough to know that writing a review online about a church? Oh yeah, totally something I would do!)

When I wrote that review several years ago, my hope was that it’d pique the curiosity of folks who might attend the church’s annual food festival and–instead of making a bee-line straight for the souvlaki and spanakopita–might opt for a church tour as well.

Somehow it’s all come full circle. Kind of blows my mind!

Additional resources:

1. New Hampshire Public Radio did a fantastic story on the Transfiguration church, specifically the work of the amazing iconographer Robert J. Andrews. Read the story here.
2. –or you can download the mp3 of the story itself.
3. Hellenic Communications Services has a comprehensive article on Robert J. Andrews’ career. (The article mentions his work on scaffolds — as a kid in the 80s I remember seeing these scaffolds in the church. I always wondered what he was up to!)

As with most successful websites, the strength of LJ lies in the devotion of its userbase. Up until recently, the “management” of LJ was rather hands-off and the site grew organically. The previous owner, SixApart, recently unloaded LJ onto a new buyer, a Russian company called SUP, and, well, things are changing quickly on LJ to the dismay of many. (Put briefly: Worries about censorship. Just to be clear: I’m in no way affiliated with any of the Harry Potter folks!)

To be fair, some of these changes were happening while LJ was still owned by SixApart. Still, considering that SUP’s recent moves to monetize LJ have shaken the confidence of many users, we’re in the thick of a large-scale problem in LJ-land. It remains to be seen what will happen with the userbase long-term; many are threatening to abandon LJ completely for greener pastures. Who knows.

But while Livejournal slowly implodes, Yelp’s doing pretty darn well. The review site is much younger than Livejournal, but it’s still doing a lot of things right from the get-go. It has a small but very devoted following in most of the major cities. There’s a healthy contingent of Boston Yelpers—I’m one of them. Yelp not only exemplifies the Ultimate Web 2.0 Ethos of transparency and interactivity (putting the users in control), it also provides a fascinating model of how to turn that into money. And, as we all well know, that’s something a lot of people are scrambling to figure out.

It’s somewhat ironic that one of Yelp’s big draws online, in Boston anyway, is that it throws and sponsors some of the best events in the city. Often these events will be co-sponsored by a local business looking to strengthen its brand recognition, but not always. Yelp members get to network and attend a fun event, the co-sponsor gets word-of-mouth advertising—it seems everybody wins.

The two common threads with both LJ and Yelp are the empowerment of the userbase AND the face-to-face human element. But the moment that LJ’s new ownership started to wrest the bottom-up ownership from the userbase, there’s been a slow-boil revolt. That’s no small threat when people pull their paid subscriptions.

If things progress as they are now, Yelp will exemplify how to foster AND monetize a healthy userbase, whereas LJ will be a cautionary tale of how to hemorrhage users from one of the largest and oldest online communities in the world.