It’s hard to imagine, but we launched Menuism.com a year ago in Oct 2006. Time sure flies when you’re eating. 
Menuism keeps growing and we keep learning more and more about food and all of you food-passionate users. What keeps us excited is that we know that we’ve only scratched the tip of helping you find food. We’re constantly looking to improve your entire dining experience and we’ll be doing some site updates in the coming months to reflect that commitment. Meanwhile, if you’ve got any suggestions or ideas, use the feedback form, email us at info (at) menuism.com or just leave a comment.
Here are some tasty stats about Menuism 1 year later:
- New York - Almost 700 users and 2000 reviews!
John and I started our eating and reviewing in Chicago and Seattle so we’re excited to see New York surpass all the other cities. There’s no stopping the foodies in NY! It may be time for us to head east and try some of the tasty sounding places.
- Canada is picking up steam with Vancouver and Toronto each with over 300 reviews!
It sounds like there’s some good eating up in Canada that we need to go check out.
- 1,279 different cities have at least 1 review! (with coverage of 48 out of 50 US states!)
This stat amazes us. It’s just goes to show that food opinion knows no boundaries. Our favorite reviews are the ones that come from cities that we’ve never heard of so keep it up!
- Over 1/4 of the restaurants reviews have dish reviews (with an an average of 2 dishes per review)
This tells us that people do care about the food at restaurants and that hopefully people are benefiting from this extra knowledge. Next time you go to a 5 star steak restaurant that has 1 star ribs or a 1 star taco stand with 5 star tacos, remember to let the world know!
We wouldn’t be here without any of our wonderful users and we’re always thankful for your participation and passion. Feel free to message either of us if you want to grab a meal!
Happy Eating!
- John & Justin
P.S. If you’re on Facebook, remember to try out the Menuism Eating app. It’ll let you share your wonderful taste with all your Facebook friends!
October 22, 2007
The weeks of coding have happily paid off; Menuism is thrilled to present a Facebook application. Short of going out to eat with your friends, it’s the best way to share the dining experience. You can enjoy a fully integrated experience — all of the reviews you see on Menuism can be read on Facebook, and the review you write on Facebook will be hanging out on Menuism for everyone to see.
The coolest feature for the food-lover might be the GutCheck option on Facebook; write down that delicious dish you’re eating for all the world to see on your profile. If you’re eating something with truffles, we want to hear about it.
We’re the first application on Facebook related to dining out and food. Time to pause and reflect: the days where we all blindly followed one gourmet expert is long over. (Heck, we used our Zagat guides to smash gross-looking bugs long ago.) One step back for The Man, one leap forward for The Masses!
To play food critic, join us on the “Eating” application at http://apps.facebook.com/menuism.
Anne, Marketing Intern
June 5, 2007
Since opening up a few weeks ago, Menuism’s been growing steadily thanks to positive buzz around features like Yahoo! Sign In and the ability to rate what you ate. Today we got another great publicity boost - we were added to the Yahoo! directory!
Even cooler, we were highlighted as a “new and notable” site, which has helped bring lots of visitors closer to the wisdom of Foodha. With today’s boost, we’ve passed a milestone of 400 registered users! Hooray, or more aptly, Yahoo! 
Returning users have probably noticed a big change on the front page. The big stars and “rate what you ate” button make it easy for anyone to start writing a review, which we’ll cover in depth in a future post.
Additionally, we’re proud to introduce Foodha’s Picks, which show off reviews that are beautiful examples of how users rate what they ate. How can your review get chosen? Simple, just write a review:
- that rates what you ate (include one or more menu items)
- that other users love (receives lots of tips)
That’s it! New Foodha’s Picks are being chosen constantly - your very next review could be one. And what do you get for getting a Foodha’s Pick? Let’s just say that you have our deepest appreciation, and possibly more in the future (once we think of something). Any suggestions?
-John
November 2, 2006
If you haven’t noticed yet, we’ve added the ability to sign up and log into Menuism with your Yahoo! account. And we’re happy to say that since we implemented it on Oct 20th, we’ve had almost 70% of new users use the Yahoo Sign In approach. I hope that means people are finding it easy and useful.
Why?
- We think we’ve got a pretty cool service, but if people don’t signup then how can they get the full experience? The Yahoo! authentication lets people signup without having to create another username/password to remember and also ensures that it’s a person with a valid Yahoo account that’s signing up.
- Yahoo has more than 250 million users (from what I last saw) which means there’s quite a few people who are eligible to signup.
How do I use it to sign up?
- Click on the big Yahoo! Sign In icon that my wonderful cousin Julia designed for us. Clicking on it will take you to Yahoo to sign in.
- Sign into your Yahoo! account.
- Click “Yes” to the agreement. After this, it will take you back to Menuism to finish the signup process.
- Pick a screenname. Yahoo doesn’t send us your screenname, so you need to pick some kind of identification for the site.
- Enter a valid email. Just in case we need to send you important account information. If you’re email is invalid and the signup email you send you bounces, we’ll invalidate your account (so use your real email).
- Agree to the Terms of Use.
- Done! Now everytime you want to sign into Menuism, just click on the Yahoo button and sign into your yahoo account when prompted (you’ll have to accept that agreement everytime) and you’ll automatically get signed into Menuism!
If you’ve signed up with the Yahoo Sign In and you don’t want to use it everytime, you can still set a password by going to “Edit Settings” on your home page. Now you can use your screenname and password to sign into Menuism which is a tad bit faster.
Questions
- Is this secure? Yes.
- Does Yahoo send any of my account information to Menuism? No. Yahoo doesn’t send us anything about you. All Yahoo tells us is “A user with a Yahoo account has successfully signed in and here’s a unique number you can use to identify him/her”.
- Do you send any information to Yahoo? No.
More Details For the Truly Curious
How did you do this? We used a cool new service that Yahoo made available called Yahoo BBAuth (Browser Based Authentication). We also leveraged a Ruby on Rails plugin that made the implementation rather smooth (Thanks Cameron!).
If you’ve got any more questions or have any problems, just send us some feedback or just leave a comment here.
-Justin
October 31, 2006
Well the past week was pretty fun. A bunch of mentions have resulted in a pretty good rise in traffic and about 86 new users - welcome to the family! Here’s a quick recap:
- Sunday Oct 22, got a mention on TechCrunch as part of a TechCocktail wrap-up. It looks like showing up at TechCocktail and having a blast paid off (TechCocktail 2 Wrap-Up). Thanks Eric Olson and Frank Gruber for organizing and thanks Frank for the TechCrunch mention. Frank also mentioned us on his personal blog Somewhat Frank
- Monday Oct 23, listed on Go 2 Web 2.0
- Monday Oct 23, mentioned on Gapers Block
- Tuesday Oct 24, got posted on Museum of Modern Betas
- Thursday Oct 26, mentioned on Julian on Software
- Friday Oct 27, reviewed by Post Bubble and got a favorable “Floating” rating (which is better than the alternative “Sinking” rating).
Not to leave anyone out, here are some links from previous bloggers (I hope I didn’t miss anyone).
We’re also starting to get some love on Del.icio.us too. If you’ve got a delicious account, bookmark us!
Thanks to everyone who’s helped spread the word. If you’re a blogger, and want to add us to your blogroll, you can use this 80×15 badge by downloading it to your blog account and using it as the link image: 
(more style and size varieties coming soon).
If you want to spread some Foodha love in the physical world, a batch of T-shirts are on the way - stay-tuned!
- Justin
October 28, 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
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