Foodspotting App Adds Dish Recommendations to the Menu

The Foodspotting app now provides individualized recommendations. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

It seems like you can't step into a restaurant without seeing tables full of people breaking out their smartphones and snapping pictures of their meals before diving in. That's the hot trend in Wired's San Francisco home base, at least, and it's mostly tied to Foodspotting, a food discovery app that lets you take and post photos of food dishes to create visual menus for restaurants.

Today, Foodspotting is adding another level of utility to its app: dish recommendations. A feedback-based recommendation engine pairs with heavier social media integration to help make deciding what to order a much simpler task.

"Most people use Foodspotting for browsing and bookmarking dishes, and trying them nearby," founder Alexa Andrzejewski said. "A lot of our users aren't super into the picture-taking, so the app has been redesigned with that in mind."

The new Foodspotting app is something of a "Pandora for food." You can now tell the app what you love and what you hate thanks to a contextual menu to the left of each delicious-looking photo. If, for example, you're lactose intolerant, you can filter away all the dairy-based items that pop up. Eventually, the app will learn that you don't like those items, and they'll be hidden from your recommendation feed. The more "loves" and "hates" you define in the app, the more accurate its recommendations will be.

The app also gets heavier social media integration, so you can discover what items your friends on Facebook (and your current Foodspotting follows) recommend when you view a particular dish. Additionally, you can see if "experts" love a particular dish — if, for example, you're not a fan of your friends' tastes.

An "expert" is someone who's developed an affinity for a particular type of dish, and has logged photos and opinions of dish variations on Foodspotting. Take macaroni and cheese. If you "love" a few mac 'n' cheese dishes, the app will notice a pattern and begin offering you recommendations from other macaroni and cheese experts. You'll also be offered suggestions of similar dishes, like mac and cheese eggrolls, or different versions of the dish from different restaurants you may not have tried yet.

"Whether you trust magazines, friends, or just your own tastes, you'll have all that information to make a decision now," Andrzejewski said. Foodspotting's Guides feature lets you check out top eats from local publications, like 7×7 Magazine and Zagat.

The new version of the app shares the same overall aesthetic of older iterations. In the top corners you can search for a specific type of dish, or check out a map to find restaurants in your vicinity. A horizontal menu wheel lets you quickly toggle between six different sections: Specials, Nearby, Best, Latest, Following and Me. In all but the Specials section, you get Foodspotting's familiar side-scrolling array of mouth-watering food photos, each with an X on the left and a star on the right. The star gives you the ability to label a dish as a Want, Tried it, or Love it.

Across the bottom of the screen, you can switch from Explore (which includes all of the features mentioned above) to Places, which lists restaurants in order of distance from your current location. You can Spot food items to share a dish you recommend; peruse Guides for professional lists and recommendations from publications; or tap Follow to follow new people, places and foods, or view your profile.

Foodspotting's new app also integrates nicely with its recently released Facebook Timeline app. The Timeline app shows things like whether you want a dish, if you've already tried it, and whether you've tried it and love it.

Those with a keen eye will also notice Foodspotting revamped its "I (camera) food" logo, de-emphasizing the camera. The logo now looks either like a piece of pie with a bite taken out, or a camera lens.

After two years in the App Store, Foodspotting now has a library of more than one million photos of restaurant dishes, and an active community of users. Foodspotting is available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Foodspotting isn't just "Instagram for food" anymore. Image: Foodspotting

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Original Page: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/02/foodspotting-app-rec-updates/

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