“You don’t need to check in to use Foursquare. Over the past few months, we’ve seen Explore use double,” the company wrote in a press release. “With billions of data points, we can always help you find the best places to go.”

The updates coming to Foursquare.com on Tuesday primarily reorganize the information on the business listing pages, making them easier to digest and putting important information like photos and hours more centrally located. The pages will include which of your friends have checked into locations (if you’ve logged in), suggest other places to go in the area, and share locations you’ve found with friends.

With Foursquare still struggling to find its footing several years and funding cycles down the road, it’s clear from the most recent mobile update that its best path to making money will come by challenging Yelp in the realm of local search. And if you’re going to challenge Yelp, you need a solid desktop presence.

Many people might be unfamiliar with Foursquare’s desktop site at all, but it’s actually been around for a while now, and the company said it gets more than 50 million visitors per month. Most of the changes to the business listings this Tuesday are design improvements, but as a Foursquare representative noted, the company hasn’t re-designed the listings since November 2011, when it launched Foursquare.com; they’re due for an update.

Here’s an example of the new desktop listings on the left and the old version on the right (click to enlarge):

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

MapR’s decision to open source parts of it code is significant, but not groundbreaking. The company is only releasing its improvements to a handful of Hadoop-related Apache projects that are included in the MapR distribution of Hadoop, but not the proprietary code that’s MapR’s real competitive advantage in the contentious Hadoop market. While it’s still not flying the all-open-source banner like Hortonworks is, the code release puts MapR more on par with competitor Cloudera, which bolsters its open source aspects with some proprietary software for managing Hadoop clusters.

MapR also took another step in the open source direction on Thursday, announcing a partnership with Canonical that integrates MapR’s M3 distribution with the Ubuntu Linux operating system. The two also have plans to ease the installation of MapR’s Hadoop software on OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure.

I wrote recently in relation to MapR’s $30 million VC investment that the company is in a tricky position when it comes to open source. The Hadoop ecosystem was built on open source and still values it immensely, but some customers are definitely willing to pay money for products that deliver the features they want, open source or not.

As for Yelp, well, it’s just following in the footsteps of many companies — Netflix and everyone doing something on Kaggle (including GigaOM) — in trying to find new ways to use its data. The data set it’s releasing is from the Phoenix, Ariz., area and include 11,537 businesses, 8,282 checkin sets, 43,873 users and 229,907 reviews. The deadline for entries is May 20, and they can be submitted in pretty much any form you can imagine.

Hopefully, for Yelp’s sake, it doesn’t step in it the way other companies — including Netflix and AOL — have when they released supposedly anonymous data sets that were later de-anonymized. Releasing data sets gives clear benefits to both the source companies and institutions or individuals accessing the data, but privacy snafus have a away sneaking up and mitigating some of the goodwill.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Jakub Krechowicz.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• How search can unlock the power of big data

Jybe was founded in 2011 by former Yahoo employees, so both the startup and Yahoo noted that the acquisition, which will shut down Jybe and have the founders working on projects at Yahoo, is something of a homecoming. Yahoo wrote in a blog post on the acquisition:

“As part of this acquisition, we’re welcoming an extremely talented group of engineers and data scientists who will join Yahoo!’s platform organization, focused on targeting and personalization. This will be a “coming home” for the team — all five are former Yahoos. Arnab Bhattacharjee was the VP of Yahoo! Search Technology (YST), one of the most well respected engineering and platforms groups in the company. He returns together with former key members of the YST and Hadoop teams — Tim Converse, Christian Kunz, Sameer Paranjpye, and Karthik Krishnamurthy.

While the Jybe app has closed, we’re confident that their data- and science-driven experience will supercharge our efforts to build great products and experiences for the millions of people who come to Yahoo! every day.”

The Jybe employees wrote in a blog post about the decision to re-join with Yahoo:

“The Jybe team first set off two years ago to bring mobile users smart, personalized recomendations on food and entertainment. This has been a fun and furious journey for our tiny startup, as we applied our various technology backgrounds to recommendation and mobile app design. It’s now time to move ahead to join a larger company, and Yahoo! is the perfect match.

For the five of us who will be joining Yahoo! this is a coming home – we are all former Yahoos. Three of us left Yahoo! to pursue our passion at Jybe, and two of us took a longer path via other startups and search-engine companies. We can’t wait to apply what we’ve learned about recommendation, personalization and the mobile experience to the hundreds of millions of people who come to Yahoo! every day. We look forward to (re)joining the world-class talent already working at Yahoo! and are excited to hit the ground running.”

Jybe had just launched its iPhone recommendation app in March 2012, allowing consumers to see reviews and recommendations, but then also move toward making a purchase on the app. For example, customers could see restaurant recommendations and then book an OpenTable reservation, or see book recommendations and get the barcode and the ability to download it from Amazon.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
• Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure

Which is why one entrepreneur has launched MyTime, a site that lets small businesses create profiles and sync their bookings calendars to allow customers to discover their sites and book appointments through the website, eschewing the potential pitfalls of local deal sites like Groupon.

Entrepreneur Ethan Anderson, who was previously a product manager with Google and then sold his last startup Redbeacon to Home Depot in January 2012, started working on MyTime  about a year ago and just launched the site this week. MyTime has about $3 million in funding from GRP Partners’ Mark Suster, 500 Startups, Brian Lee, Jason Calacanis, David Tisch, and others.

The site, which is starting out with businesses in L.A. but looking to expand, allows businesses to create a page for their company, sync up with Yelp reviews and ratings, sync appointment calendars, and set deals for particular slots to entice customers to less popular times. The service is free to join, but companies that let MyTime promote their offers through dynamic pricing, Google AdWords, Twitter ads, and other solutions give up 40 percent of revenue from bookings that come through the promotions (excluding existing customers). Anderson said about half the businesses so far have taken advantage of the marketing option.

The site exists right now as primarily a desktop website that’s optimized for mobile, but Anderson said developing native apps is up next. He points out that while local review and ratings sites are common (think Yelp, Foursquare, etc.), the actual booking component is not as well widespread.

“Our vision for the business is that you connect your calendar once and then everything is taken care of. We bring your customers back, and we allow you to later connect with your consumers. And for the customer, it’s the ultimate convenience,” he said. “I feel like no one else has brought together the calendar and the pricing and the actual e-commerce experience. “

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

So why were the feds investigating Google in the first place?

A group of Google competitors, many of them tied to Microsoft, claimed the company was breaking antitrust laws by kicking competitors down its search rankings. Sites like Yelp and Kayak complained that Google favored its own search and travel businesses ahead of theirs in the search listings.

The Federal Trade Commission responded by “exhaustively” investigating a wide range of Google’s business practices, including its ad business and use of patents.

So what did the FTC find?

Today, the FTC concluded that Google didn’t break any laws in the way it displayed its search results. The agency said that Google did change the way its search algorithm sorted results but that those changes were “plausibly connected” to efforts to improve its user experience — not simply to crush competitors.

The FTC did say that Google misbehaved by using standards-essential patents (ones it is supposed to share at reasonable royalty rates) as a weapon. Google responded by saying it won’t do that anymore.

So why is this a big win for Google?

It’s a win for Google because the government won’t get all up in its search results. Microsoft and others had hoped the government would impose some sort of “search neutrality” requirement on Google but that won’t happen now. The end of the investigation also means that Google won’t have to reveal any of the “secret sauce” that it uses to order the search results.

The company also avoided a so-called “consent decree” about its search practices; these decrees set out what the agency thinks a company has done wrong and how it must behave in the future. Consent decrees also act as a magnet for private lawsuits.

As for the patent issue, it was just a sideshow that has little effect on Google’s core business or strategy.

So Google can do what it likes with its search results?

Pretty much. In the past, the company claimed its results were strictly objective but more recently it has argued that search listings are simply a matter of opinion protected by the First Amendment.

The company did, however, make a voluntary pledge today to remove snippets from Yelp reviews and other such sites if the company in question asks them to; Google also said it won’t punish those who opt out.

Is this bad news for consumers?

Not necessarily. So far, Google has stayed more or less true to its stated mission of helping people find any type of information (search “Google sucks” for instance). It’s only in so-called “search verticals” like shopping that Google, like rival Bing, has really been putting its thumb on the scale and favoring certain partners. But in the future who knows what Google will do.

So who loses?

The biggest loser is Microsoft, which funded a long-running cloak-and-dagger lobbying campaign to convince the public and government that its arch-enemy had to be regulated. Sites like Yelp, Kayak and Expedia also lose in the sense that Google can now push them down its search listing with impunity (though there is no sign for now that Google is actually doing this).

The FTC is also a loser because it ran a high profile two-year investigation but came up dry. In this context, the patent ruling is just a minor victory that lets the agency save face.

Did the FTC simply cave in to Google?

Not really. The FTC was in an awkward spot because it didn’t have a slam-dunk case. The agency would have had to prove the existence of a Google monopoly and that Google abused that monopoly; it would also have to clear the First Amendment issue. Rather than risk the embarrassment of losing a lawsuit, the FTC decided to fold its cards instead.

But aren’t European regulators going to force Google to bend on search rules?

The European Commission suggested in December it will come down harder on Google. According to a source familiar with the matter, the outcome is likely to be a “commitment decision” in which Google promises to behave a certain way or else be fined. The source added, however that the rules of a European “commitment” do not expose companies to private lawsuits so, unlike in the U.S., Google will be willing to enter a binding agreement.

It’s too soon to know what that outcome will be but we’re likely to find out in the next month.

(Image by Kzenon via Shutterstock)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• How consumer media will change in 2013

Path’s search function hinges around what looks like a normal search bar at the top of the screen, but when you tap it to enter a phrase, Path auto-suggests several ways to search: By person (you can hunt for all your memories that took place with a particular person), by place (you can look back and see moments from your favorite restaurant over time), by time (check out the music you’ve listened to at night, for instance), or by timeframe (everything that happened in April or last year.) You can also search for moments posted nearby, so if you’re looking for a coffee shop or sushi restaurant nearby, you can see where your friends have been in the area.

The search function on Path is definitely more personalized than what you’d find on Google, or even on Foursquare, under the assumption that the people you connect with on Path are your true, close friends (it’s limited to no more than 150 connections). So your results could be narrower but more targeted as a result. For the most part, Path’s search function feels closer to Timehop than Yelp, letting you discover moments from your past, rather than focusing on businesses that are necessarily nearby.

The biggest question in my mind when looking at the search function is whether users will immediately understand how to use some of its coolest features. Most of us are used to using the Gmail search bar to find keywords that we know appeared in the particular email we want, but Path’s search goes a little further than that.

A search for “weekend brunch” will turn up results for check-ins on weekends (the search engine knows that you mean posts on Saturday or Sunday), and at restaurants that serve brunch (by using Foursquare’s API to see which restaurants serve brunch food, even if the original post didn’t include the word “brunch.”) You can also search for “royal flush” to see moments that gathered all possible reactions from your Path friends (heart, smiley face, frown, etc.) It’s very cool, but not something users might immediately grasp. Although the suggested search terms can help with that.

And the success of the search bar is also very dependent on a user being a somewhat regular user of Path — it’s most interesting looking back at a wide variety of data from a long time period. The company is at about 5 million registered users, said Nate Johnson, the company’s VP of marketing, up from 3 million in April, but if you’ve only been posting on the network for a week, it probably wouldn’t seem as cool, although it would certainly work.

But I had a lot of fun searching through my Path moments from a year ago, and it’s an interesting step forward for the company in making social media check-ins and shares less chronological and more thematic to search through.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Shopping Matters When it Comes to Location-Based Apps
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Now Facebook users can see a list of places that Facebook believes are relevant to them based on friend check-in data, likes and user recommendations. They can browse different categories and subcategories or search for specific businesses. Individual business listings tell you which of your friends liked that business and other pertinent information like address, distance and hours. Users can opt to call the business, check in upon arriving, view the business on a map or visit the merchant’s Timeline. Facebook is also providing user ratings for businesses, which Facebook began testing in October.

Like Foursquare, Facebook Nearby will get better and more personal the more people use it. Facebook said it will also look to add places from third party services in the future, which could mean Foursquare data as well. Businesses who want to show up in Nearby will need to establish and maintain a Facebook Page.

The improvements to Nearby should help Facebook become more useful to mobile users, who are very intent driven when they search for things. That, in turn, could help Facebook make some money if it can tap into the local advertising market. Nearby doesn’t sport any ads right now but it’s easy to see how Facebook could insert sponsored suggestions for local businesses.

I’m not sure how big of an initial threat Nearby will pose to Yelp or Foursquare. Most users are not used to looking to the hard-to-find Nearby tab for local search and recommendations the way that hardcore Yelp or Foursquare users are trained to search through those services. And there is richer content right now on Yelp and Foursquare as well as Google, which can show Zagat ratings and information.

But Facebook has more than 600 monthly mobile users. And it says that 150 million people visit Pages on Facebook every day around the world and more than half of those visits in the U.S. come from a mobile device.

This should be an interesting product to watch because it will indicate how serious Facebook is in mobile and location-based services. And it provides another glimpse at how Facebook will try to make mobile pay off.

The rollout of Nearby is starting with a small number of users but should spread soon to all iOS and Android users soon.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Opportunities and challenges for mobile deals
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

CEO Marissa Mayer is slowly making her mark on Yahoo, and the addition today of Levchin to the board can probably be seen as a testament to Mayer’s faith in engineers and entrepreneurs. From the get go, we’ve heard Mayer, who was a former executive at Google, asked for more engineering talent at the beleaguered web portal. Just this last week some of her changes at the product level associated with adding new features to Flickr and other changes are coming to light. Levchin fits right in.

Yahoo had apparently been courting Levchin for a while, and it certainly needs a blast of innovation from someone known in the Valley for being thoughtful and well-versed in developing social startups. For more on Levchin, check out this post from 2010 featuring a video interview Om did with Levchin while he was still at Google.

Levchin also serves as chairman of the boards at Kaggle and Yelp and is a director at Evernote. Yahoo also said that Intuit CEO Brad Smith and Weather Channel CEO David Kenney are stepping down from the board, leaving Yahoo now with 11 directors.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

But it’ll need that dough: ZenPayroll is taking on a big challenge — providing payroll software-as-a-service to small and medium companies and thus taking on payroll behemoth ADP (although obliquely since ADP focuses on large companies.)

Joshua Reeves, CEO and co-founder of ZenPayroll

ZenPayroll CEO and co-founder Joshua Reeves cites IDC numbers to back up his contention that there’s a ton of opportunity here.  ADP along with Paychex, Ceridian and Intuit handled about $7 billion of a total $13.9 billion in US payroll in 2010. The other $7 billion is split up between lots of small local providers and companies that use error-prone manual processes.  ”Small businesses have been slow to automate payroll — many of them still do it on paper and calculate taxes using spreadsheets,” Reeves told me.

The Internal Revenue Service’s own stats show that a third of US small businesses are fined for payroll tax mistakes annually to the tune of $5.3 billion. Clearly, there is a payroll problem to be solved.

ZenPayroll says its SaaS will ease that headache at a fraction of the price ADP and others charge. It will charge companies $25 per month and an additional couple of dollars per employee.  For a ten-person company, that ends up being $780 per year compared to $3822.80 for ADP Compliance with Pay Convenience or $1,428 for Paychex Small Business Paperless service. Other competitors include outsourced human resources services, but they focus on a full suite of services, not just payroll, Reeves said. And payroll is ZenPayroll’s sole focus.

Payroll is serious business

Ease of use is critical. “You go to the web site and request an invite. We respond in a few hours, you set up the account, enter employee ID numbers and send invites to your employees who add their own information,” Reeves said. The service supports direct deposit or payment by check, according to whatever pay schedule the employer prefers. It supports bonuses, reimbursements, garnishments — all options a business needs.  And it integrates with existing e-sign and e-fax technologies, Reeves said.

The service, the beta of which has already handled several millions of dollars in payroll, runs on private, dedicated servers that are backed up many times a day in multiple locations, Reeves said.

Payroll is a big, big job and no one — not company CEOs, CFOs, employees, state or federal tax authorities — has a sense of humor about mistakes. Reeves said the company has hired payroll tax experts with decades of experience from ADP and Paychex. This is important — because tech smarts is one thing — but doing payroll right also requires deep expertise in tax codes and regulations.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map

Pinterest Operations Engineer Ryan Park had the stage to himself for a session on Wednesday, while Flipboard Chief Architect Greg Scallan and Yelp Engineering Manager Jim Blomo teamed up with Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers Partner Ray Bradford to form a trifecta of wisdom on Thursday.

Know — and measure — your costs

Flipboard’s Scallan had a paradoxical lesson for the audience when it comes to managing cloud-based infrastructure: Embrace the cloud, but be afraid of the cloud. Yes, it’s flexible and affordable if done right, but all it takes is poor planning or a handful of servers left running ad infinitum, and the costs can begin to grow out of control. That’s why Flipboard assigns members of its engineering team the title of “chief miser,” which means they’re the ones who decide that applications are using the right resources and using them wisely.

Thanks to a variety of practices, including its miserly ways, Scallan said Flipboard is now running about 900 instances at any given time. That’s down from a peak of about 1,500.

Some stats on Flipboard’s AWS usage

One way to help ensure this sort lean operation is to understand your business inputs and outputs, Kleiner Perkins’s Bradford explained. He suggests companies ask, for example, what it costs them to serve a free user on their platform and how does that change with scale or affect the experience they can offer premium users. Pick metrics that really matter, he said (e.g., infrastructure cost per user per month) and then consider how long your current  architecture can sustain that cost before it’s time to retool.

The secret weapon: Source your instances wisely

Pinterest, Yelp and Flipboard all swear by AWS’s pre-paid Reserved Instances in order to save money over the long haul. In fact, Flipboard’s Scallan said, the e-reading startup sees cost savings of about 80 percent over three years by using heavy-duty Reserved Instances instead of on-demand instances for its base workloads, and the break-even point might be only eight or nine months. Pinterest’s Park cited savings of about 70 percent over three years using them.

The trick is queuing another job to take up the waste.

Yelp’s Blomo said his company is a heavy Elastic MapReduce (EMR) user, peaking at more than 350 Elastic MapReduce instances when many developers run their Hadoop jobs simultaneously or when it’s doing nightly analysis of its log files. In order to keep costs in check, Yelp uses Reserved Instances whenever possible to save on hourly bills and has implemented a job-flow pooling system to keep Hadoop jobs running continuously as resources become available. This helps avoid the situation where a job completes in 61 minutes, for example, thus triggering the charge for a full hour of resources even though it only used a minute worth of the second hour.

In order to best gauge when it should use what type instance, Yelp created a tool called EMRio that analyzes past usage to determine what resources are the most-efficient choice for any given job.

The results of EMRio

When it comes to optimizing costs on AWS, though, Pinterest appears to have it all figured out — even how to make use of the somewhat tricky Spot Instances that are priced based on demand and can be terminated without notice if the market price outgrows a user’s bid. Park explained how Pinterest uses the heck out of Reserved Instances and created its own auto-scaling “watchdog” service that decides whether to use Spot Instances or on-demand instances when more resources are required.

Ryan Park dropping knowledge — and graphs

Although Spot Instance prices occasionally spike through the roof, Park’s experience is that they typically remain stable and can result in “massive” savings if you know how to use them effectively. Using Spot Instances to power Pinterest’s approximately 80 front-end servers costs only about $20 per hour, he said. All told, Pinterest has reduced its daily computing bill to about $440 from about $1,200.

All this being said, though, Park, Blomo and Scallan all acknowledged that the flexibility of being able to mix on-demand, reserved and spot servers might not be all it’s cracked up to be if you don’t understand how they all work. Reserved Instances are inflexible in terms of size and region once you reserve them, and Spot Instances must be used wisely for jobs or applications that can handle their easy come, easy go nature. And now there’s even more to consider because Reserved Instances can be resold via AWS’s spot marketplace.

“It gets a little tricky,” Blomo said.

Pick your challenges

Although decisions such database type and structure are largely architectural, there might be elements of cost efficiency at play, as well. Maybe Kleiner Perkins’s Bradford put it best while leading off the session with Scallan and Blomo. Bradford presented a slide containing a simple quote from Instagram Founder Mike Krieger: “Your users around the world don’t care that you wrote your own database.” Sometimes, Bradford added, it might be best to use what works — maybe even a managed service — rather than whatever’s trending highest on Hacker News.

Pinterest’s Park expressed a similar sentiment during his session, citing a lesson his team learned about trying out too many new databases. The site used to use MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis and other databases simultaneously, but learning all the new technologies and managing them became burdensome. Now, he said, Pinterest uses good, old-fashioned MySQL (granted, it sharded MySQL 4,000 times) and memcached — as well as Redis — because they have strong communities and new engineers are more likely to know how to work with them.

After explaining EMRio and some other custom-built Hadoop tools to the crowd, Yelp’s Blomo noted that companies should carefully consider whether the time and money it takes to build stuff will actually result in commensurate savings once those tools or systems are in production. That can require some tough balancing of criteria such as cost, performance, flexibility and user experience.

But it’s important to use human resources wisely. As Bradford said during his presentation, “There’s no free lunch when it comes to developer time.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
• How direct-access solutions can speed up cloud adoption
• Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud