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Time to spread some fear, uncertainty and doubt in the Valley! Here's why the Bubble Threat Level currently stands at Yelp Trademark Red:

  • Yelp leads the new round of bubbliciousness with a $10 million injection from BenchMark Capital, and the social review site still isn't turning a profit, despite monthly traffic of 1.5 million unique users (which probably translates to over 3 million pageviews) on a commercial site primed for targeted ads. It's fun to see a bad business go down; it hurts to see a good business kill itself with excessive cash. [VentureBeat]
  • Upcoming search engine Powerset, which impressed even me with its tales of "natural language search," makes search maven Danny Sullivan roll his eyes. [Search Engine Watch]
  • Even the behemoth Wal-Mart, which foolishly entered social networking earlier this year, gives up after just three months. If they can't afford to run a dot-com, who can? [Ad Age]
  • Only cranks believed that MySpace is worth $20 billion. But one of those cranks is one of the site's founder. [MySpace Report]

Photo by Yelpdotcom [Flickr]