Imagine you are traveling and you’re at an awesome restaurant or hanging out in a great resort and you become a FAN! You’ll want to tell everyone about it. Your mobile phone and the new app from GoodRec (Good Recomendations) makes it simple to bang out a short review on your phone and share it with other travelers.
While many folks travel and dining experiences are guided by the recommendations of others, its been just too much effort for travelers and diners to write reviews themselves. Until now.
The free application Good Rec for iPhone is based on the twitter norm of 140 Characters and will definitely appeal to folks who post status updates on Twitter or Facebook. The website for GoodRec also lets users push their recommendations to Twitter and Facebook.
While the vast majority of people wouldn’t take the time (especially on their handheld) to post a review, the GoodRec application simple interface driven by the universal “thumbs up/thumbs down” and 140 character burst of advice-giving, might sway many folks to remark on their great or not-so-great dining experience.
For me, Trip Advisor’s Restaurant finding app, Local Picks has been a godsend when traveling. A big part of its value is that it taps into existing restaurant reviews in a very large database of reviews that has been developed on Trip Advisor over many years. When looking for a good place to eat, I often rely on this tool to find me a local restaurant with good reviews.
140 character restaurant reviews could be a great thing once the volume of recommendations grows.
I think the best way an application like the free iPhone App, by GoodRec can make an impact is:
- make a traveler dedicated version with focused recommendations that appeal to travelers: restaurants, hotels, attractions and the like. (currently the app supports wine and book reviews)
- merge review results with an existing review database and by pulling short forms of existing restaurant reviews into its database – from/with TripAdvisor for instance.
- partner with existing review sites and merging your technology to make it easier for folks to post reviews on existing / popular review platforms
Robert Scoble interviews founder of Goodrec’s CEO, Mihir Shah about the company’s mobile recommendation service.
Related Articles:
