Have you ever snapped a photo of your food and posted it to Facebook or Twitter? Do you use social media while you’re eating? Have you ever turned to a website, app or blog to learn about food? If so, you’re not alone. A new infographic from Flowtown, in partnership with Column Five, shows that social sites and food just may be the perfect pairing.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
2011 was a big year for Reddit. Not only did its traffic surge, but it had quite a few cultural moments. Whether it was powering the Occupy movement or selling a movie script, the network seems to be gaining power and influence daily. It’s like the Godfather of social sharing sites. So when I came across this Reddit guide to fitness, I knew I was in for something good.
OpenTable, the free online restaurant reservations site, launched its redesigned mobile web site this month. The site uses HTML5 to provide a new look and feel to visitors. It makes use of HTML5′s ability to work with integrated geolocation features in a phone to find and make reservations at nearby restaurants.
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We first wrote about the nutrition web site Foodzy last May. Foodzy is a web app that helps people track what food they eat. It attempts to make the process of tracking food fun by awarding badges for good eating habits. Foodzy has now launched their free iOS and Android apps, although while the apps are free you need to sign up for a $15 per year Foodzy Pro account in order to use them.
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A new “fast casual” restaurant has opened in San Francisco that takes advantage of smartphones to provide fast delivery of grilled cheese sandwiches. The Melt, who’s owned by Jonathan Kaplan, the man who brought us the Flip camera, has just opened. You can order your meals ahead of time on a smartphone, but they aren’t made until you arrive at the restaurant.
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It is one thing find and prepare food at home to meet dietary restrictions or preferences. But, it is quite another thing to try to find places to eat with dishes that meet those same dietary restrictions. Bon’App is a free app fo rthe iPhone that will tell you in plain language what your food contains and how healthy it is for you, based on your own food preferences, food allergies, and dietary goals. Bon’App saves your food restrictions and preferences in a profile to help you find dinings spots that meets your needs. It can also track your food intake. An added bonus is that the app uses Nuances Dragon Mobile speech recognition technology combined with the iPhone’s touch interface to provide a simple user interface.
Looking for a Good Nutritionist? Download the Newest NMDP Graduate—Bon’App! (Dragon Mobile Apps blog)
The app’s price will be $6.99. However, it is currently free for a limited time.
http://itunes.apple.com/br/app/bonapp/id437083777?mt=8 (iTunes App Store)
Video courtesy of BonAppChannel
How granular are we going to get with check-ins and reviews? How about down to the dish level? That’s what the new free Nosh for iPhone service and app sets out to do.
Nosh provides the following functions:
+ Rate and review dishes, not places. After all, it’s the food that matters.
+ Keep up with friends and see what they’re eating. Follow friends, or anyone so long as they have great tastes!
+ Find out “what’s good here”. No more relying on the waiter.
+ Browse menus by the highest rated items, what your friends have had, or any other way you choose.
+ Check out photos of the food before you order.
+ Comment on friends’ food experiences.
+ Track what you’ve had and where. Never forget a food adventure.
+ Instant sharing to Facebook and Twitter.
In theory, this is great. In practice it is all about getting to critical mass and it isn’t there yet in my specific case. I allowed Nosh to authenicate with both my Facebook and Twitter accounts. It found precisely one person in that list that was also using Nosh that I could follow. And, that person is based several thousand miles away from where I am. Then, there’s the issue of venue accuracy. Nosh listed a couple of nearby restaurants that closed a year or more ago. One feature did find useful is that Nosh lists dishes available from a specific restaurant. Techcrunch noted that this being done by a team in India using automated tools to populate the information. I have not verified the accuracy of the dish lists.
Firespotter Labs Launches Nosh: A Food-Centric Instagram That’ll Tell You What To Order
I’ve always enjoyed looking at photos of food that I ate while traveling. In the past two years or so, I extended my food picture taking to many of my lunches. The main purpose of the lunch photos were to answer the questions of friends and co-workers who asked “what is that and where did you buy it” when they saw me in my former workplace’s kitchen area. But, wouldn’t it be nice to get a bit more information from these photos of food?
I read about phone photo services in Japan a year or two ago that gave the phone user nutritional information about their food photos. That seemed like a good idea but the service was not available in the U.S.
Say Cheese: iPhone App Takes Food Pictures, Counts Calories (TIME/Reuters)
Reuters just reported about a recently released $2.99 iPhone app that provides a calorie range estimate based on food photos recorded using an iPhone.
New app calculates calories through photos of food
So, is it just a gimmick? I haven’t tried it yet. But, the app has earned a respectable 3.5 star (out of a possible 5) rating based on 90 ratings. Many commenters in the App Store say it is working well for them. One commenter took a picture of his/her cat and reported that the app say “not food”.
Food and the media have long gone together — just think cooking shows, Martha Stewart, and the zillion food and wine magazines out there. But food and social media is an even tastier combination. These days, whether you’re interested in food trends, inspiring recipes, or personality chefs, tweets are a hot spot for information, especially when you check out these 20 Twitter users. Read more
CHOW hopes to whet readers’ appetites with the release of its second annual CHOW 13, a list of 13 people “who inspired the biggest trends over the past year” in the food world.
One interesting name on the CBS Interactive-owned food site’s list: foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, “for making going out a competitive sport.”
Crowley’s most recent great meal, from his CHOW 13 profile:
I went to a place in the Lower East Side called The Meatball Shop that was mind-blowingly awesome. I’m a big splitty/splitty fan, so — I went with our GM — we got one pork meatball sandwich and one chicken meatball sandwich and split them down the middle. The atmosphere there was so crowded; it drives me crazy. I went down for lunch one day, and it took us about an hour.
CHOW senior editor Lessley Anderson said:
The CHOW 13 isn’t about creating a list of the hot new chefs, but looking at people whose work is hitting a nerve and becoming part of mainstream culture. We looked at this year’s biggest stories in food — cult wines, unfancy foods, competitive bar hopping — and identified the person or people who we believe help set the movement in motion. The list may include people you’ve heard of and a lot that you will hear about in the year to come.
