| Emailed Eric something akin to the "Hunch for food" idea a while back. How I roughly imagined it: Scrap the calorie count. Unless you're at a fast food restaurant where it's posted on the menu, people really are bad at guestimating these things. Change the health ranking to a taste ranking, and have it be for specific dishes at specific restaurants. While Foodspotting is sort of playing in that space, they are just asking people to submit pics of stuff they like, sans rating. While it's great to know what people like, I also want to know what to avoid. And it's much harder to sort through comments than it is to glance at numerical ratings. Use case: I go to Corner Bistro for the first time. I do a search for Corner Bistro on Eatly. I see that Eric has had the cheeseburger and that Mike has had the chili and fries. With ratings added, I see Eric gave the burger a 9, but Mike gave the chili a 5, so I'm going with the burger. In the same vein, using tags and descriptions, aggregate photos and average scores for menu items at restaurants. So I look up Corner Bistro, and I'm presented with a photo (the top ranked photo?) and average taste rank for each item on the menu. It's the Waffle House of Menupages [and I just created a new vertical]. And, yes, eventually it could suggest restaurants and dishes based on my activity and that of friends. Obviously need to make the entry process as frictionless as possible. Few different thoughts there: 1) Expand current email capabilities, a la Posterous. Use special characters to note the restaurant name, add tags, rate the item, etc.
2) Automate and outsource: map EXIF data to restaurants (imagine you guys could find a database like that somewhere...), superusers for aggregating and tagging, etc.
3) And has been mentioned, iPhone app that makes it all pretty and easy |