AOM 2012 #5 – Time Out

“Your guide to what’s happening in the most exciting cities on the planet.”

Time Out is obviously one of the most influential review sites known all around the world as it covers all of the big cities, however, with regards to the UK, it only has reviews from London. Because of this, there are no reviews for restaurants from other towns and cities such as Newcastle, Liverpool or Glasgow, which for my proposed application on Facebook, would be no good, as the whole point of it would be to help people in certain areas find new and exciting places to visit without having to travel very far.

The good thing about Time Out however, is that all of its reviews are written professionally which means that they are all of good quality. Even though having good reviews is important, having critics and professional writers feature on my Toptable application wouldn’t really work. It would take away from the UGC feature of the app and one of the main points of it is that a lot of the time, recommendations from friends and family mean more to people than the opinions of a random stranger who people don’t know. This is going to be one of the USP’s of my application, rather like the share feature on Spotify. Music recommendations from your friends is better than a robot churning out information on what you should be listening to.

AOM 2012 #3

Okay, so, I’ve been given the green light for my restaurant finder/review addition to Toptable which will like up with Facebook and maybe Twitter as well (I think it might be a little more difficult on that site though so that might not be the best idea). Now it’s time to start doing my research.

In the next few posts I’ll be looking at sites were restaurant reviews can be held already such as Urbanspoon, Time Out and food magazines that host them as well as the success that other applications have had on Facebook such as the Guardian and Independent article readers.

Another thing I’ve been told I should think about is some sort of incentive that will spur restaurant goers to write mini reviews and give feedback so their friends and family can see where they have been and what they thought. This incentive will probably be money off of some kind where, if you input your thoughts you get £5 off your next bill or something like that.