You should this

You should get this.

Timehop, a daily email telling you what you were doing one year ago.  Simple integration with facebook, foursquare, instagram and Twitter so you can be reminded where you were, what you were doing and what you were talking about 365 days ago.

For the nostalgics out there, a great thing to wake up to every morning.

You should see this.

Eric Fischer’s tweets-as-map project showing the motions of New Yorkers.  10,000 geo-tagged tweets and 30,000 point-to-point trips show the projected flow of people moving up and down major thoroughfares like Broadway, and across the cities subway system.

You should follow this.

French Cuisse.  A 19-year old culinary school graduate posts beautifully spare pre/post photos of the ingredients he uses and the dishes he creates.  I haven’t come across a Tumblr that is more perfectly focused or consistently smile-inducing.

Someone will write a case study on this kid some day; great use of Tumblr as marketing vehicle.

…Genius!

amyblogschow:

First encounter with WaitAway. You give the host(ess) your phone number which she types into the app. It then texts you a link to track the wait time for meatballs and mint ice cream. Impressive.

You should get this (or a couple of these).

This is not a typical post for me as the topic - restaurant recommendations - is what I’m most passionate about.  Now, five years after my ES 615 project (the Pandora/Netflix for restaurant recommendations, duh) that I left on the shelf, we finally have some applications that are attacking this in the right way:  Ness and Forkly, both of which launched this week, as well as Alfred, Nosh, Chewsy and Recco.  Damn!

Although I’d eagerly anticipated Forkly for months, Ness looks like the frontrunner, at least for me.  You rate places, it learns your preferences, then scores future search results with the likelihood you’ll love each to help you pick - simple.  Alfred is very similar, but less attractive and with a very dated pseudo-personality that I don’t get.

Forkly talks about developing a taste graph (sounds like Pandora’s music genome…or, uh, Hunch), but it seems to lean more towards the social aspect of sharing places and foods you love with your friends, and seeing what they like.  There is more emphasis on photos (Instagram-like, and less interesting) as well as on individual dishes (multiplies the complexity, but could be quite interesting).  Nosh and Chewsy also are focused on individual dishes, and it seems Nosh has a leg up having some menus already loaded in their app so they aren’t as reliant on users adding dishes - somewhat heavy lifting to ask of a customer, especially on a mobile device.

It is kind of mind boggling that I believe all of these guys have launched this summer.  It makes for a crowded field, especially with features from big players like Foursquare’s Explore and Lists, Yelp’s relatively effective search and bookmark tools, and Tips that they both offer (often helping you pick what to order).  There are also smaller start-ups like Dinevore, and expert curation from the likes of Immaculate Infatuation - they are even doing their own (likely manual) take on collaborative filtering with a quite effective “You might also like” for most of their reviews.

It is interesting to note that there are essentially two models emerging:  1. learn my preferences and tell me what I’d like (more trust required), or 2. let me build lists, either my own bookmarks, or those curated by media/chefs/brands, etc. to reference (more control, but more work).  Both have value, the latter more so in your home city, especially if you are plugged in to the dining scene, but the former could be awesome when traveling.  I like that Ness does a good job of making both quite easy.  And of course Netflix has been doing both; there are different but closely related customer needs here.

While all of these competitors are interesting, there’s one simple social product enhancement that could quickly magnify the network effect - it kills me everyone is missing it.  I’m happy to dust off my March 2009 PPT deck and take someone through it.  In the meantime, let me get back to Code Academy.