A community for foodies: The Foodist Colony
Another of the cool people I met last week in New York was David Ziegler, founder of Foodist Colony - a community website that allows food lovers to share restaurant recommendations. The community has been growing rapidly since David launched the site two years ago. There are lots of cool features to save people time: content is aggregated from the best food bloggers/websites and presented as a map mash-up.
Community members can rate and comment on restaurants and this creates an attention index of the top and buzziest restaurants. There are restaurant charts. Users can create a personal restaurant guide and share this with others. They can follow other people whose recommendations they find useful. And they can even book restaurants. Foodist Colony also launched a highly successful iPhone web app a few months ago, and this was featured at Apple.com as Apple’s ‘Staff Pick’. As a measure of the site’s success, it’s impressive that a whopping 73% of all registered users have bothered to build a personal restaurant guide. This is a vibrant, living community.
The site currently serves the good folk of New York, but it’s obviously an idea that would work well in other cities both in the US and beyond. There are widgets - see a couple of example here and here. And of course there’s a Twitter page, which I am now following