Recently I've become engaged with social dining sites, in fact I'm sheepish I didn't find these sooner!
Applications such as Foodspotting and the recently- launched Forkly stimulate my hunger and expand my appreciation of beautiful-looking food. They are also useful ways to capture, rate (or 'nom') and upload images of individual meals and share them with others beyond the dining table via other SM platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, all with the incentive of gaining status and rankings similar to Foursquare.
Some things to note:
- These sites are based on the notion of communicating only stellar dishes - not an avenue for consumers to complain about their dodgy satay beef or crappy service. I think I like this feature, sometimes I get tired of hearing scorned customers' complaints and just want to know what's good to eat.
- As inspired by previous entries and their comments, I wonder if establishment owners would use this as an opportunity to show off their 'edible art' incognito. I think I would be tempted...
- As someone who has the annoying habit of taking photos of food when it arrives to the table, I now have somewhere to put them. It feels like the "time-poor man's" option of blogging. See my first entry submitted below from a local cafe in the Western suburbs (which on a side note, is highly recommended!):
You can view Forkly's YouTube video describing their attributes below.
What do you think of this trend of social dining... apart from feeling famished?
I reckon this is really cool. One thing that did catch my eye was the google map at the bottom. This highlights the importance of having an internet preference. The convenience that and app such as Forkly creates is very powerful. See something you like, read authentic reviews, know where to find it, its great!
ReplyDeleteRoss
Thanks for your feedback Ross! I just realised another fellow social dining app, Urbanspoon, has also come to the party with images of dishes from establishments close to you.
ReplyDeleteSomething that I've also been thinking about since my post.. is what happens when you have a photo of an incredible-looking dish that ends of tasting like cardboard... or have something you'd want to share that tastes unbelievable, but looks like it's seen far better days??
@Natasha... I agree, food ratings and reviews need text as well as images.
ReplyDeleteAs all rating systems and sites are open to manipulation (by both business owners and their competitors), I always ignore the best and worst reviews, and look at what the majority have to say. Outliers are often suspect!
Keep up the great work!
@Natasha - I just saw that spam comment appear, and then Google's filters obviously removed it. Did you see it? Not surprising, given the title of this post! :)
ReplyDeleteHi @Wags, yes I got the email notification that someone had commented on my post. When I read the comment I was thinking, "what the hell...". It's quite lame I was almost flattered for a second that my blog would be spammed, because at least people out there know it exists! Haha! But at that same time, very impressed with Google's filters removing it almost as quickly as it was posted.
ReplyDeleteawesome I put-off buying this for months, despite positive reviews.
ReplyDelete