foodha for thought - menuism blog

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!

Some of you might have noticed that things look pretty different on Menuism. We’ve been listening hard to your feedback and decided to give the site a facelift for the better. Menuism is all about helping you eat better, and one of the biggest goals of the update was to give a lot more focus to users and how they related to each other and the restaurants they dine at. Here’s a quick tour:

• Left Context / Action / Menu Bar
  • The top part of the left menu column is the context data. On a city, user, or restaurant’s page, you can expect to see a snapshot of relevant information here.
  • Right under the pages that have a context box, there might be an action button section. These are the important actions you can take on that page. If you don’t know what to do, look there.
  • The Menu Bar has a bunch of colored tabs that show you what kind of content is available to you.
• Header
  • We tried to clean up the header a little bit and make search a little more straight-forward. You can easily hit the restaurant, food, and user search from the top.
  • On the top right, you’ll always have quick access to your home, try list and settings. When in doubt, just click on your own pretty picture!
• Content
  • The content is a bit more organized now. You’ll notice that things are more contained and many of the boxes have a link on the top right to either go to a more detailed page or take action.

This is only the start. There will be more changes and optimizations rolled out, but we wanted to get the basic layout change out so everyone could start playing with it. If you’ve got feedback or more ideas, let us know!

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements.

-Justin & John

March is here and the seasons are a-changin’! A new month means a new Food Fight, and this month we’re asking YOU to help us find the BEST BURGER in your city!

To participate, just review a restaurant and rate the burger you ate. You’ll be automatically entered into the contest to win $50 - you can find out all the nitty-gritty details at the main Food Fight contest page.

Fun fact: the average American consumes 27.8 pounds of hamburger a year. That works out to over 9 quarter-pound burgers a month, per person. Why not share your favorites, so everyone can enjoy a better burger?

Happy Eating!

John & Justin

p.s. We’re still tallying the best pancake results from February, and we’ll post the results soon.

Happy December to all you hungry readers! The new month brings lots of updates at Menuism (plus the huge backlog of blog posts about them), and one of the most exciting is the ability to upload your own profile image.

How do you do it? Just go to your user homepage and look for “Change Pic” under your current picture.

What about using Gravatar, you might ask? We were initially excited about using their simple service for user avatars, but technical issues on their side have closed off the service to new users. With all the great new users joining the site, we didn’t want everyone to wait any longer, so we chose to implement our own system. Maybe one day we’ll reconsider Gravatar, but our priority is to ensure a good experience for you, our loyal users.

We just added the image feature very recently and we’ve already seen great adoption by lots of users. It just takes a minute - if you haven’t uploaded an image yet, there’s no better time than now.

-John

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

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

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:
  1. You get an confirmation email with the great news.
  2. 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.