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In the two weeks I have been using Wisdom, an iPad and iPhone app that gives you detailed demographic data about your Facebook friends, the number of users has gone from just over 4 million to just under 6 million. Part of that rapid growth is most likely attributable to an extensive advertising campaign on the iPad version of the New York Times (which is where I first heard about it).

With all the cloud storage providers available these days, one thing I was looking for was a simple way to share and synchronize a networked file server in my office with a cloud-based repository. Sure, there are dozens of providers that will let you synch to your desktop. But what if you have a couple of branch offices and want to share files between them or have multiple users in a single office and single place to backup your most commonly used files? That is a tougher proposition.

Think about your average, smartphone-enabled visit to a new restaurant: You sit down, take a gander at the menu and quickly pull out your phone to look up the latest Foursquare tips and Yelp reviews. Some are novels of glowing hyperbole while others lament the irritable waitress and denounce the spot as the diner on the seventh level of hell. Either way, you often find yourself overwhelmed and more confused than when you started out.

Loopt, the mobile location tracking app and social network, announced today a new feature called Loopt Qs, "a fun, really social way to get bite-sized insider info and share your own opinions about a local place."

At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco today, Google gave an update of its rich snippets initiative - which adds extra information to Google search results. For example, showing restaurant review ratings. It's an experimental Semantic Web feature, but today's update shows that usage is increasing and Google wants to ramp it up significantly.

Rich snippets was announced in May last year and began to be seen in results around October. At the SemTech panel today, Google's Pravir Gupta noted that rich snippets impressions have grown four-fold globally since October 2009, with a two-fold increase on the US/English Web. Rich snippets is available in more than 40 languages.

The reviewing site Yelp has partnered with the online reservation site OpenTable. Now you can check out a restaurant review on the former and book it on the latter without leaving the page.

Restaurants, Yelp said on its blog, make up 29% of its reviews. The partnership seems strategically smart.

What do you get when a Christian pastor, an atheist, a grad student and a lawyer set up a website to criticize churches?

I swear, this isn't a bad joke. It's a very real site, ChurchRater, and it allows anyone with an Internet connection to identify and review church services around the world. Is the site inspiring frank conversations about worship and religion, as its creators intended? Is it allowing sometimes closed or cliqueish communities to see how they appear to outsiders? Or does it, as some users wrote, "trivialize the deep dimensions of spiritual experiences" and "bolster the notion that church is a consumer-oriented proposition"?

A few months ago, Google rolled out Place Pages with the lofty vision of creating a Web page for every place in the world. In addition to a map-view of local businesses, users can access hours, transit stops, reviews and geo-tagged photos. As of today, the company is offering a color-coded ranking system for specific aspects of a businesses' services. The question is, does the new feature mark the beginning of the end for restaurant review sites?

After eating the best meal of your life, it's hard to forget the experience. It's not unusual for individuals to spend a decade in search of the perfect New York-style pizza in California or the best ramen in London. At this level of obsession, you simply can't be satiated by reading menus or scouring the blurry restaurant pictures and user-generated diatribes of regular review sites. Whether you've got a fixation on fresh lobster ragoût or a hankering for hickory smoked ham, Foodspotting lets hungry users peruse through what can only be described as food porn.

Despite Apple's recent addition of the "Apps for Everything" section to their website, a new feature that makes it easier for iPhone owners to find great apps by category, the sad truth is that app discovery is still a challenge that needs to be solved. Thanks to some 75,000 applications now live in the iTunes App Store, there are just too many to sort through these days. Numerous startups have sprung up, offering their own solutions to this problem, including AppBeacon, Freshapps, 16apps, Appsfire, Appolicious, AppShopper and others. However, no one site has figured out the perfect formula just yet. Now another online catalog hopes to succeed where others have floundered. The brand-new App Classics aims to be the "App Store's missing Hall of Fame," featuring only the apps that have stood the test of time and are worth the download.

Recent research by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of crowds" is a trustworthy force on today's web. His research focused on studying the voting patterns across several sites featuring user-generated reviews including Amazon, IMDb, and BookCrossing. The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large number of ratings. In other words, as many have already begun to suspect, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the "crowd" really thinks, leading online reviews to often end up appearing extremely positive or extremely negative.