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This week two tech companies built on user-generated reviews but with very different goals made financial news. Yesterday, Yelp, the local recommendation site, filed its first major step toward going public. It wants to raise $100 million in an IPO. Angie's List, which provides consumer reviews of services providers such as dentists and electricians, officially went public this past Wednesday. Its stock rose 33% and at the end of the day, the company was valued at $801.7 million.

Both Angie's List and Yelp offer user-generated reviews, but there's a key difference. Yelp had 61 million unique visitors as of the end of Q3 2011 and 22.4 million reviews. Angie's List is much smaller, but it has more than one million paying members.

Google took further steps against Yelp today, adding features to the My Places tab on Google Maps. Businesses you've rated with Google Places are now highlighted on your maps, displaying your rating and showing other personalized recommendations based on places you've already shared. The highlights are available on the desktop and Google Maps for Android.

These new features push forward Google's efforts to be a one-stop-shop for mobile, location-based searches. From finding the restaurant to walking in the door, Google is building applications to compel smartphone users to use Google and only Google to find, shop and eat at local businesses.

Today Sprout Social has come out with v2 of their social media management service. It adds personalized dashboards, multi-user account management, an iPhone app, and dozens of other features. We covered their launch last year here.

Google just launched a more streamlined process for updating small business listings on Google Places, but it asks forgiveness instead of permission. Instead of requiring owners to manually update the listing, Google Places will now automatically update with user-submitted info or updates to another source on the Web that Google identifies. When a listing is updated, the system will notify the business owner of the change by email.

Google touts this as a convenience and points out that a business owner can quickly log in from the email and correct any erroneous changes. But this is sort of a strange update. Google Places listings are an important way for businesses to be discovered from Web search, and business owners might not be partial to those listings updating without their expressed consent. Then again, some might feel that maintaining Google listings is a hassle, and this update will save them the effort.

This week, Google chairman Eric Schmidt will testify before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. The hearing is called "The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?" Schmidt will be followed by testimony from Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of Yelp, whose company's treatment by Google exemplifies the ethically touchy parts of Google's search business practices.

In July, Google made its move in local business reviews, pushing results from sites like Yelp down the page below reviews from Google's own Places service. The accusation is that Google's search privileges its own content (and ad businesses) ahead of competitors. These allegations have arisen before in both the U.S. and Europe. But are these practices really anti-competitive under the law?

Nosh, a mobile app for iOS and Android that lets you post and read reviews and photos of individual dishes on the menus of restaurants, has released an updated version of its app that supports sharing photos of food with friends in private locations - like the food you cook at home. Craig Walker, CEO of the company that built Nosh (Firespotter Labs), previously co-founded the companies that became Yahoo Voice (Dialpad) and then Google Voice (GrandCentral). Walker says that private locations were among the top user requests when the app launched six weeks ago.

Food nerds are often even more proud of the food they make at home than what they find around town to eat - but most food photo and review services don't support home cooked food posted without a publicly visible location. Now Nosh users looking for nearby food won't see the enchiladas that came out of your oven and come knock on your door - but your friends on the network will see them in their stream of updates from contacts.

The Google Places iPhone app saw a major upgrade today and added three features that will make it all the more appealing to use instead of competing mobile location search apps: filter by proximity, rating and price, filter by "open now" and the ability to read full reviews of restaurants and other businesses inside the app.

In other words, show me a coffee shop that's close to me and open now. The addition of these features to the Google Places helps bring its app to feature parity with Yelp's iPhone app. You'll need to download an update to the app to see the new features.

Today, Foursquare launched a new version of Pages. The update allows anyone to sign up for a brand page that can push tips and check-ins to followers on Foursquare, as well as to Facebook and Twitter. Foursquare lets users add new locations to the service, but, until today, there was no good way for most places to actively reach out to users, unless their owners waded through a daunting application process for a brand page.

Updated with comment from Google below. This was probably something you could see coming: Google Places, the search giant's relatively new play in local search and reviews, today announced that it has revamped Place pages and removed excerpts from reviews on 3rd party services.

For now, sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, JudysBook or Europe's Qype will be linked-to at the bottom of a list of Google Places reviews. (Sometimes they appear at the top.) This seems to me like the kind of thing that could be discussed in an examination of potentially monopolistic business practices. Independent review sites have had to know, though, that the company that delivered them up in search results for so long would be tempted to just create its own content and keep review searchers on Google's own sites. Google Places is a very compelling service for users, too.

A judge has thrown out a lawsuit accusing local business review site Yelp of extortion. The lawsuit made a number of allegations against Yelp, accusing it of acting in a way that added up to "implied extortion," wherein businesses were said to be treated differently on the site according to whether or not they advertised with Yelp.

Today, a judge dismissed the lawsuit on a number of grounds, including that some allegations were "entirely speculative."