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

I met Will Stephens for a beer last week in a pub in Williamsburg (I can’t remember what it was - very hoppy) to find out more about Beer Menus - a very cool beer, bar and map mashup covering Manhattan and Brooklyn. Will had a terrific story to tell about the new service. It launched in March this year and now carries details of nearly 300 venues/beer menus, and 1,514 individual types of beer. It’s a labour of love, but it also addresses a genuine business need: people who run bars very strong beer-dens don’t want to run websites on the whole. In many ways, the bit that most impressed was the way in which they’ve built the service so that people who run bars can keep the menus (including prices) up to date with little or no extra effort.

Will started the site with his brother and the story of two boys creating Beer Menus has a ring of Bo and Luke Duke about it - in a good way. I love brother stories - and was out there working with mine, so it seemed like a sign. But that wasn’t all. The project that took us to NYC has been using this bar called Spuyten Duyvil as a placeholder, and I was astonished when Will told me it was just round the corner. Half an hour later I was beginning to understand why people working in such close proximity to *very* strong beers need very simple ways of updating their websites. I was two drinks in to an evening but they were both the same strength as barley wine or super-strength lager. It was great fun, but I think I’ll sick to my pilsener shandies ta.

Anyway - it was ace to meet them. BeerMenus is built in Ruby on Rails and these guys gave done a really great job. It’s grown quickly and seems eminently scalable. What I like about it most is the way they’ve done fewer things really well.