Foodspotting gets the 2.0 moniker and is better than ever

A while back I told you about Foodspotting. Do you remember that post? OK, well here's your bullet points:

• You take photos of a specific food/dish at a restaurant
• You upload those photos to the Foodspotting site along with a little description of the food, if you're feeling randy
• People can then look for foods around them or at specific restaurants and see photos of the yummy food you just snapped a photo of

They came out with an iPhone app a few months ago and it was OK, but it was buggy and lacked a lot of functionality and features you'd expect. Well, 3 days ago they came out with version 2.0 of both the site and the iPhone app and both are bad-ass improvements.

I loved the site and the concept before, now I'm shopping for the ring. It's such a great idea and the way it integrates with iPhone (Android, soon) Twitter and Facebook are extremely well executed. It's insanely fun to look at some of the dishes around the world and search for dishes that have been spotted near you; I've searched out dishes and restaurants from photos on the site and am glad I did; the photos really did them justice. I've bookmarked foods from all over the place to try when I'm anywhere near them and the guides provided by foodspotters, famous chefs and so forth for various cities really give you a chance to find not only the restaurants you should visit but see photos of the dishes that these people recommend. Sofa King cool.

So if you have iPhone you have no excuse to not use this app (it's free) and even if you don't there's no reason you shouldn't become a foodspotter and snap photos of your food and share them with the rest of the world, especially if you're visiting a place that's not yet known to the Foodspotting community.

Foodspotting

I've been remiss in posting about this and figured it was time to do so...

I joined the beta version of this site a few months back and they've really been upping their game and making improvements and enhancements to both the website and iPhone application and I think everyone should sign up. Here's how it works...

You go to a restaurant or some public place serving food, take a photo of the specific dish you got, upload the photo to the site, write a little review (if you'd like) and then others can search for that specific dish (let's say, spicy tuna roll) or set a location (say, Huntington Beach, CA) and search for a food type (like sushi) or restaurant (like Tuna Town) or just search for all foods near them. Then when you find what you're looking for you can see an actual photo of the food and hopefully get an honest review of it and the restaurant. Users can also "NOM" a food, indicating it's one of their favorite foods and that they recommend it to other users and you can NOM other foods you've had though did not post an actual spotting of that food. You start with 10 NOM's and earn the ability to NOM more foods as you post more foods; it's pretty fun.

iPhone users have the added convenience of being able to upload photos and reviews directly from their phone, NOM foods and basically do everything the website allows but with the added convenience of being mobile; it's really slick. Restaurant information is available as well as tying into Google Maps in order to help you contact and find the place a food was spotted as well as see push pins on a map of all places near you that where food has been spotted.

It's super fun to see some of the foods that are posted from all over the world and get inspired to try something new or try a restaurant you'd heard of but never knew anyone that had tried it. If this picks up in popularity (if volume of food spottings and reviews is any indicator, it already has) then it has the ability to be an incredibly useful guide as you could go to a restaurant and see photos of dozens of dishes they have to offer and read unbiased reviews, all before the waiter even drops off a menu.

So, add something to the community and make discovering great food a super fun and simple process!

Sign up for free to become a Foodspotter...

www.foodspotting.com

iPhone application (opens a link in iTunes)

Scanwiches

Here's a great website I came across a while back. This guy takes a sandwich, cuts it in half and scans the thing. That's it. No commentary, no humor, no wit, no reviews of the sandwich, just a scanned sandwich.

http://scanwiches.com/