It’s been a really exciting week at the Menuism office (aka the garage). All the fantastic praise and feedback we’ve received keeps us hungry to make Menuism your best way to discover great food in your area, so thanks, and keep it up! We’ve had well over 100 new reviews in the past week, and lots of fantastic new users such as xuster, opilicious, shihnong and phatcat1688 contributing their wisdom and opinions to the community.
We want Menuism to be the best for YOU, so we added lots of ways to customize and shape the site to your benefit. One of the most powerful ways to do so is by tagging restaurants to make them easier for you and others to find later. We’ve already tagged a lot of them, but it’s your tags that really help make the site your own. Don’t know what to tag? Try tagging restaurants that are romantic or vegan, offer happy hour, or are Diner’s Club affiliated. Every tag helps! How useful is tagging? As an example, my former employer offers a discount card known as the Prime Card. Certain local restaurants offer good discounts to Prime Card holders, but it’s always hard to remember which ones. I took the liberty of tagging all the local participating restaurants with the tag “MS Prime”. So now Microsofties looking for a cheap meal can just search for “MS Prime” in the area and take their pick! You can check this out to see the results.
There are plenty of restaurants on the site that are waiting for your tags, so get to it!
-John
October 6, 2006
It’s been quiet on this blog lately, but for good reason – we’ve been hard at work making small (and not-so-small) changes all over the site. Many of these changes come directly from your feedback, so thank you, and keep it coming!
Reviews
- Wrote a review, but made a typo? You can now edit the text bodies of your reviews and accompanying menu item reviews. Just go to your reviews list on your user homepage and click on the offending block of text to make your fix.
- While you’re looking at all your beautiful reviews, you might notice that they’re now sortable by the most recent reply – this makes it easy to quickly respond to the whims of your adoring fans.
Users
- User search: we’ve added a simple user search capability to the site. Just click on the checkbox in the search header to find a user, and enter their screen name or first name. Enter their city and state, or leave the location box blank to search across the whole site. Now it’s super easy to find your friends and favorite reviewers!
- Profile customization: show the world who you are! On your user homepage you can now add a custom tagline, website url and personal description which are visible to all users. I challenge you to come up with a better tagline than Justin’s – “living to eat is much more fun”.
Invites
- It’s great to see that people are using the invite feature to share the site with their friends, but the feedback loop wasn’t fully complete, until now. Now when the friends you invite join the site, two things happen:
- You get an confirmation email with the great news.
- Your friend automatically becomes your fan (on the site). Who wouldn’t be a fan of your beautiful self?
Design
- New front page: what do you think? We pulled out the user lists to better recognize both the best tippers and reviewers and rearranged things to increase the educational effectiveness of the page.
- New restaurant pages: we hope the smoother layout and new nifty little graphics help you navigate the restaurant pages more easily. Writing a review and voting for the menu usefulness has never been easier!
In addition to these features we’ve also made a lot of under-the-cover changes and fixes to keep things running quickly and smoothly for your food-finding enjoyment. Let us know what you think of the changes, and keep spreading the word!
-John
p.s. If you’re curious about the other thing that’s kept us busy lately, you can read about it on our business blog.
September 26, 2006
Invitations
If you’ve been visiting the site regularly you might have noticed a few changes, the biggest of which being the open invitations. If you have an account on the site you can now invite friends by going to your home page and entering their emails into the invitation form. Before we send the email you’ll get a chance to customize the email message. Do you have a friend that really knows good food? Invite them and add them as a friend and you’ll start get recommendations based on their actions. Build your network of trusted friends with similar taste and never go hungry again! (bold claim huh?)
Frontpage
As you may have noticed, our design is ever involving. Currently we’re focusing on the front page. We’re shooting for a blend of education and content. Let us know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
Growth
As we start to open up little by little and refine the site it’s been a real joy to see users coming back to use the site and new users joining. Sure, there’s only a few of us on the site now but it just makes it a more tightly-knit community. We even had our first user to hit 100 tips received! Here are some of the top users (as of mid-day Sept 13):
These users have written many great reviews that have been recognized with tips from other users. Just for fun, when you go to your homepage you’ll see your top 3 tippers.
Thanks to everyone that’s been so great about contributing reviews and especially those menus – it’s really helping the site take shape!
Keep sending feedback and we’ll keep working to please you.
Justin
September 13, 2006
We’re often asked how Menuism can help find new and tasty places to eat. We’ve worked hard to build a number of tools (tagging, map-based filtering and sorting, ratings, favorites, etc.) that help those hungering for new tastes to find and choose what they want. But what if you need a little extra inspiration? What does Menuism have for you?
We’re happy to announce the addition of suggestions to the Menuism world. We’ve got two types of suggestions for your dining pleasure:
- Restaurant-based: restaurants that are user favorites will show other restaurants that those users also liked.
- User-based: it doesn’t get any easier than this – check your user homepage (“My Home”) for a daily restaurant recommendation, based on your own Favorites and the opinions of those you’re a fan of. Menuism can’t read your mind (yet), so make sure to mark your favorite restaurants to help us give you good suggestions.
Try out the suggestions and let us know what you think. This is just the beginning of the suggestions feature, so we’re open to any ideas to make it more useful/accurate/pretty/and so on.
-John
August 29, 2006
While browsing the restaurant pages you may (or may not) have noticed the Related Links block in the right column. It might not have been so interesting up until now, but we think you’ll be checking it out a more from now on.
What’s the purpose of the related links block? In short, choice and information. Our goal is to provide everything you need to make an informed and tasty dining decision, and that includes adding and allowing you to add links to other online resources for any given restaurant. As long as they help you eat better and tastier, we’re happy. 
Over the next few days we’ll be adding related links from a number of other online guides to all the restaurants. That’s the easy part – the hard part is finding the local gems – the small city guide or newspaper whose restaurant reviews you follow religiously, or the local food critic who has a website you set as your homepage. If you know of one, let us know! Or if you’ve written a blog post about a restaurant we have listed, add the link yourself!
So, check out the Related Links for the restaurants, and let us know what you think.
-John
August 24, 2006
Just a couple updates.
- View all reviews at http://www.menuism.com/reviews. Just a fun way to view all the reviews ever written. Shows the user and the number of tips they’ve received for the review. We’ll probably add some sorting capabilities to this, so let us know what you’d like to see.
- Updated city page Julie helped us revamp the city page design so it looks much cleaner. Let us know if you have some design suggestions or if you’d like to see certain content up there.
Other minor things:
- Your cities under the search bar If you haven’t noticed yet, there are links to the city pages under the search bar. Before they were just top cities but now they include the cities that you have stored location for. Just a quick shortcut to see what’s going on locally. Oh, and if you haven’t tried it yet and you’re bored, try out the raNDom link. It’s fun to see where you end up and see what they’re eating (well, I think it’s fun).
- Menu last updated On the restaurant page, there’s a little notice saying when the last time an item was added or edited just so you can tell if the menu’s been getting any love recently (thanks Sara).
- Fixed some minor nuisances with signup Hopefully you’ve already created an account.. (thanks PhilosopherK and Risto)
- Fixed stars issue for review in IE Hopefully they should work fine now. Let us know if they don’t. (thanks takeru)
- Review form is less confusing …hopefully. (thanks methodrider)
Thanks to all for the feedback so far. We’re still going through it all while working on some other things along the way. Keep it coming!
- Justin
August 23, 2006
Couple more new things we just added.
1) Sortable Search Results Now after you get your results, you can sort by either
- Match – This has been the default sort method. Basically, restaurants that best match the search terms (tags, restaurant name, or menu item names) show up on top. If you search for “American” and “Chinese” a restaurant with both tags will show up near the top.
- Distance – This will sort things by the distance from the center of the city you entered as the location. We want to eventually let you search by a specific location, but it’s not there yet.
- Rating – This will sort restaurants by the ratings, putting the highest rated restaurants on top of course.
We hope these new sorting options help you find food faster!
2) Fans V.1
We’ve been thinking about the best way to implement this for awhile, and a number of you have also suggested something similar. We didn’t want just another “social networking” site where friendships are defined by your acceptance of a friend request, so our implementation is a little different. We wanted something a little more tailored to the goals of the site. So here’s the brief sumamry of what’s there now:
- I’m a Fan! – Is there a user that you respect? Click on the “I’m a Fan!” link. You’ll be added to the user’s virtual fan club.
- A Fan of… – On a user page you can see all the people you’re a fan of and also see who other people are fans of.
- # of Fans – On a user page you can also see the number of fans a user has. Someone with a high count is likely well respected in the community.
Of course, there’s more coming and you can probably start to guess the things we’re planning to do.
Question: How do you like the new search sorting?
Hope you enjoy the new toys!
- Justin
August 15, 2006
So here’s a fun little feature that we whipped up over the weekend – browsable top users list. Now you can see the highest tip givers and receivers.
Some Tip Reminders:
- Tips are what count, not points. So if you’ve been accumulating tons of points, find some good reviews to tip!
- You’ll get rewarded even more if you tip a good review rather than a bad one. How? When other people tip the same review you tipped, you get a fractional bonus (for your tips given total) – this can add up very fast for a good review. It’s sorta like buying into a hot stock really early.
- If you haven’t grasped the tip concept yet. Just think about tipping at a restaurant – you tip for good service. There are big tippers and big tip earners (those who provide great service). Everyone loves both kind of people, so we highlight them!
Here’s the link to check out the users list:
http://www.menuism.com/users
You can also browse by city (there’s a link under “Top Users” for every city page):
http://www.menuism.com/cities/Seattle/WA/users
Now you can see all the cool gravatar images people have been putting up! If you don’t have a pic yet, go to http://www.gravatar.com and create and acount with the same email address you used on menuism.com.
If you post any comments on the blog, use the same email address and your pic will also show up here (same goes for any other blog that is Gravatar-enabled).
Question: Is the tips concept confusing? Any suggestions for clarifying it?
Enjoy!
- Justin
August 14, 2006
Grab the RSS feed
