One of the best part of Yelp reviews is the comments, that often point you to a good dish on the menu at a restaurant you are visiting. Foursquare does it well with “tips” left by visitors to an eating establishment or a bar that are essentially a recommendation to order a specific dish, a kind of drink or a type of tea. Of course there are apps like Chewsy and Foodspotting that have focused on food related conversations and social sharing.
Today, Firespotter Labs, an incubator of sorts backed by Google and co-founded by Craig Walker, the co-founder of Google Voice, released Nosh, an app that will compete with the incumbents.
Nosh is a mobile app for iPhone and Android that allows users to check in, rate, review and share menu items. You can think of it as a cross between Foursquare and Yelp for dishes. Nosh helps answer the question of “what’s good here?” by giving users what essentially amounts to an uber-menu on their phone, leveraging the content generated by the Nosh community to create a much better dining experience. It’s a fun and social way to share what you eat and find out what’s good everywhere.
Nosh has approximately 150,000 menus, 475,000 restaurants and 10 million menu items in its database, which makes it pretty easy for one to take a photo of a dish, check-in to a location and start sharing that with friends and family.
I have been using the app for a couple of days and there are a few things which actually will make this app a worthy competitor. Nosh does a good job of creating the follow-follower viral loop that had made Instagram and Twitter very popular with folks who don’t want to share, but want to consume the information others are sharing. Nosh as an app is pretty simple, lacks pretension and is easy to use. I would urge you to give it a try.
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