After trying several of the social networks for restaurant go-ers I settled on Urbanspoon. It was the simple stuff that won me over, the been-to / wanna-go-to list and the reviews not only by users but foodie blogs and newspaper articles. Neither that revolutionary but they’re missing from the likes of Qype and TrustedPlaces which only use community content.  It’s been a few months and I’ve started appearing in the charts, (something unexpected and wasn’t looking for now am suddenly competitive over) I’ve also started reviewing and taking photographs, both things that mean I’m spending more time on the site and leading me to now want more from it.

Recommendations please. There’s currently none.  It’s all based on ratings which gets you some way but I have to do a lot of filtering to find the places I’m interested in.  If venues could be tagged then over time you  can use my profile to suggest places that are not only highly rated but also ‘informal’, ‘local’, ‘east london’ or whatever came up.

Introduce me to people. Not to eat with, just to casually link to. Maybe people who live near me or regularly eat similar types of food, kinda like twitter following.

Help with sharing. For the one friend I have (see point 2) it’s tricky to share and discuss stuff. Pushing me to email breaks the experience.  When I’m there I want to open up conversation in the page, maybe even open it up to others.  Even just a way to send restaurant or booking details to friends via facebook would be nice.

That’s a shortlist. There’s others but these would be lovely and if you want to encourage more of it then UserVoice is pretty cool.