The Experience of Others

You're sitting in a restaurant having a great time, in fact it's a wonderful evening.  You have a good round table with a bunch of friends, the food is fantastic, the service is excellent, the wine is flowing.  The next day you get an email from the restaurant owner asking to rate your visit and you give it 5 stars.  It was fantastic.

Mrs Restaurant Owner is very happy because her customer was deeply satisfied with the experience.  She also runs a good business so she made some money that night.  Overall, it was a success for everyone involved.  Fantastic guest experience, good business, everyone is happy.  Wonderful. Beautiful. Perfect.

Ah. Experience.  That's a troublesome thing you see because it's actually quite difficult to establish what precisely was it about the experience that was good.  Was it the conversation?  Was it the company?  Both of these things?  Or the food? Or the seating configuration?  In fact, it's all of these and much more.  Experience is an emergent phenomenon.  It's emerges from a set of relationships, objects and timing in a specific moment for a specific individual to feel, well, something.

Product managers of a website have the same challenge as a restaurant owner.  They need to create an emergent set of experiences that support the business objectives.  Those emergent experiences could be for example, ease of use, joy, engagement, desire, advocacy (telling others), typing in credit card numbers, or creating a profile.

A Product Manager is an experience engineer.

Creating something which is emergent is not easy.  It's bloody difficult.  If everybody could do what Apple have done with their products in the last 10 years they would have done, but they didn't.  If something is difficult to do, it's difficult for others to copy.  And creating emergent systems that create wonderful experiences is extremely difficult. It's part art and part science.

In this world of emergence first you need to understand the systems from which your experience will come from.  The restaurant owner looks at all the details, from hiring of chefs, their kitchen organisation, the staffing rotas, the buying of ingredients, the menu design and hundreds of other small details and tries to create repeatable patterns of success that result in emergent experiences that restaurant goers rave about.  It's difficult in a restaurant and it's difficult on a website.

This web of interrelated influences that creates the emergent behaviour is a 4D world.  It's like the web itself, connected nodes of influence that act like the synapses in our brain, triggers firing behaviour from one sphere to the next. The fourth dimension is of course time, because each customer interacts with your company several times in several ways in different states of mind at different locations.

A creative product manager will first try to understand the web of influences, understand the triggers and amplify the ones that work, as well as trying new things that could be new influences and triggers.  All the time, measuring the impact as best she can.

Here's the thing though, experience can never be fully measured.  It's indescribable, intangible.

I can try and explain to you how I felt thinking this through on my walk up Shaftesbury Avenue this morning, Run DMC pumping through my headphones, excited because I'd pulled together some thinking that I'd been dwelling on for weeks, rucksack on my back, thinking of my next ski touring trip.  I could try.  No-one can ever really feel that except me, at that time, in that place with my history, future and present before me.

You can measure many aspects of experience, many dimensions.  Snapshots. Like the restaurant rating from the delighted customer.  You cannot really feel the experience of others, but you need to do your damn best to try.

As a product manager you are dealing with millions of those experiences.  And furthermore, you are building an interface that your customer will experience using a team of other people.

Building great experiences for others, through others.  A tough, but rewarding challenge.

Restaurant Marketing Post-Recession

Where can you get great restaurant marketing advice?

Before the recession it was boom-time in UK restaurant-land. Lots of celebrity chefs, lots of new exciting concepts, lots of new openings. Pubs went gastro. There were more seats available at more tables serving more great food.

Then there was the recession. Restaurants could no longer get bank funding. New openings slowed to a snail's pace. Diners thought twice about dining out. Food inflation. Vouchers became common place. It was a triple whammy; higher costs, lower revenues, lower demand. Ouch!

Some smart restaurants have survived and thrived, through ruthless attention to their proposition and adapting their marketing to the new world.

Next up we have VAT being increased to 20%, unemployment coming from the public sector. The tough times are not over yet.

If you're a restaurateur looking for inspiration and advice to thrive in the internet age, you should check out Abbie Hanks' latest post from theblackboard.net, it's a great restaurant marketing blog with loads of tips and tricks, from SEO to social media to website optimisation and everything inbetween.

In hard times, invest in marketing.

Community 101, Drive Usage, Then Monetise

STOP PRESS!!!

Since I wrote this blog, my frustration and objections are now resolved, you CAN now hear what I really thought about location based services on video...


ORIGINAL POST....

Location based services. Buzz words. You hear them a lot right now. But what do they mean?

Simply put then, if I know where you are, can I offer you something that uses that knowledge in real-time?

If your mobile phone tells me your location co-ordinates...
- if I am Google I can show you a map of where you are and what is nearby
- if I am a restaurant booking app on your iPhone (e.g. bookatable) I can show you restaurants nearby
- if I am Foursquare I can present local restaurants and bars that you can "check-in" to and see who else of your friends are there

Three very simple examples then. But what of the future?

What are the implications for consumers and for marketeers?

At a recent plustechnology event run by London lawyers, Olswang, I committed my comments on this topic to video.

A company called Knowledge Peers were videoing peoples thoughts. Today I received an email with a link to a short video on my observations that targeted marketing can be welcomed by consumers rather than seen as obtrusive, and that location-based technologies help with accurate targeting.

Can I share it? No!

I really don't get it. I mean, I REALLY don't get it. What the? Uh?

Knowledge Peers is a members only site. I tried to send a share this link to a friend, they first had to sign in to Knowledge Peers. Fail. They STILL couldn't view the video. Doh - that sign up was for standard membership. Apparently I have full membership and that's why I can view it. Double Fail.

Look, if you want to build a community site, it needs to be viral, self-sustaining. You need to drive USAGE first, then monetise when you actually HAVE a community.

It's all upside down. I should be able to embed the video in this blog post, email it to friends. If they get value from the content, maybe they will sign up and subscribe.

The content on Knowledge Peers is pretty good. I mean, it's like a YouTube for business. But walling it in is route to oblivion.

So much for trying to share my thoughts on location based services with you. Sorry!

London Restaurants: Ignore Foursquare.com At Your Peril

A new social network just hit London: Foursquare.com.

Already big in the US, I am willing to stick my neck out and predict that this will develop faster in London than swine-flu.

If you're just getting your head around Twitter, you'll need to step one step further to "get" Foursquare. Once you do, I think you'll realise this has huge potential, as a network phenomenon and as a marketing tool.

The basics.

OK - so you log into Foursquare.com and create an account. What next? You invite others to join and be your "friends" (just like Facebook). You then download the Foursquare app to your smart phone. Ready.

Now, you are on the move, you go out in the evening, and when you arrive at a place (bar, restaurant, concert venue, event, coffee shop, whatever), you "check in". On your phone you simply load the app, it uses the phone's location to identify known venues in the area and you select the one you're at. Simple as that. Then - you can see which of your other friends are also there. Maybe there's friends that are out on the town that you didn't know were out on the town. You decide to hook up on the fly.

Here's the bit you need to pay attention to if you are a restaurant.

First of all, make sure you are listed. The initial list of London restaurants is seeded by WCities, and there's loads missing. Once logged in you can add your place in the "add things" link in the menu. If you're listed, people will be able to "check-in" to your venue easily.

Secondly, there's a competitive element to FourSquare. The person who checks in the most to a venue becomes that venue's "mayor". This person is your most loyal Foursquare customer. They will be visiting you a lot.

This means that you can create a loyalty scheme on this platform. "If you are our mayor, simply present your phone and you will get a free drink". As people to compete to become your mayor, you get mentioned in a whole Facebook / Twitter universe and your brand awareness soars. It's all online and it's all free.

Sounds far fetched? Maybe this year it won't be, but I can see this becoming big for a certain demographic. Huge. The future is just around the corner.

Here's a useful blog post on how to get the most out of Foursquare.com as a user.

Livebookings On CNBC

Dragon says "I'm in"...

Great piece on CNBC yesterday. Live interview with Niklas Eklund CEO, talking about boosting restaurants' profitability.

James Caan, of Dragon's Den Fame, gave his approval.

5 minute clip...

Why Does A Restaurant Need A Website?

I was looking over a discussion forum when I came across the following question...

"My good friends David and Terra own an amazing restaurant and bar in Colorado. They have owned the restaurant for a couple of years and do a steady business of mostly repeat customers. That's good. They don't have a web-site yet - that's not so good. I constantly obsess about all of the opportunities that they are missing because of it."

It's a simple question really. Why do I need a website?

Here's my reply to the question...

Not having a website is like having a road with no signposts to get to it.

The majority of potential diners are looking online when deciding ahead when to dine. If they don't find your website, they'll find someone else's. You need to interact with your customers in the channels which they inhabit.

Your marketing relies not only on your physical presence (your location) but also on your virtual presence. I'm sure there's a sign on the front of the restaurant and a menu in the window. Having a website takes that same principle and gets your storefront into the virtual world.

Of course I imagine what your friend is thinking is not "do I need a website" but rather "what is the return on investment" that I get for spending those hours and dollars on a pretty set of webpages.

It's simple; your website needs to work for you and pay it's way. It needs to take reservations, it needs to provide directions, menus and it needs to persuade people that your restaurant is where they want to dine.

At Livebookings we've found that you can convert 1 website visit in every 10 to become a reservation. And when you take those reservations, they give you email data that you can store to start building a guest database. After that you can do email campaigns to build a stronger relationship with your customers and encourage repeat diners.

Mobile Online Restaurant Booking From fonefood (lastminute.com)

Booking a restaurant online on your mobile.

I'm excited. Today sees the launch of fonefood, a new beta mobile restaurant booking service from lastminute.com.

You want to find or book a restaurant. Nowadays one of the easiest ways to do that is online. You don't need to wait for the restaurant to be open, you don't need the restaurant to answer your call. You can book there and then online and in real-time.

Increasingly though people are taking the internet with them in their pockets and more of us expect to be able to get online anywhere at anytime.

That's what's great about fonefood. You can book tables on the move! You're on the train, you're in a taxi, you're at the airport. Wherever you happen to be it's easy to search and book with your web enabled mobile phone.

fonefood is available at http://m.lastminute.com/fonefood

Try it out. You are given descriptions of nearby restaurants, with currently over a thousand available deals, discounts and promotions. It uses Google Maps to show restaurants near your chosen location. Once you’ve chosen a restaurant there is no need to call, you just book directly on your mobile (for free!) and receive an instant confirmation via SMS. (This is especially handy if you're abroad and don't speak the local language).

It is available in 12 countries and gives users access to over 6,000 restaurants. The restaurant reservations technology is powered by Livebookings Network.

lastminute.com even put a cool little video together on Youtube to market the service....





I love progress!

Q & A on Restaurants and E-marketing

I recently had a chat with the guys at e-consultancy.com about Livebookings Network (My day job).

We talked about which types of restaurants are making the best use of online marketing and what other opportunities are out there for its aggregated reservations model...

Livebookings has been around for a while now, as has the idea of online bookings for restaurants. How well has the idea caught on with consumers and what types of restaurants have made the biggest strides on the web?

Livebookings Network as it currently exists has been around for two years, having been created in 2006 by the merger of two restaurant reservation system providers – Livebookings in the UK and Loghos in Sweden. The ambition then was to build the business model and prove it would work in our core markets of Sweden and the UK.

Having done so, the plan was to go for a second round of funding and take the business model further geographically. That’s what we are now doing. We are now focusing on expanding through Europe – to France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and throughout the Nordics.

Our most mature market is London. There, there is a wide range of very sophisticated, fine dining restaurants that are looking to maximise their covers. It is obviously better to get two guests per chair in an evening than one, as it doubles your turnover. So a lot of those restaurants are using complex software solutions to manage their reservations and many of them are then connected to online distribution networks, such as ours.

The more advanced restaurants are also using a lot of online promotional activity to drive bookings, such as special offers to fill their shoulder periods. It is often difficult for restaurants to fill every session throughout the week so if you can put together offers for those periods, such as between 6pm and 7pm for the pre-theatre dining crowd, you have more chance of maximising your profitability.

What about consumers?

Consumers are getting used to the idea of booking online. The majority of our bookings come through a la carte bookings but we do see major spikes in booking levels when we run a significant promotional campaign around events. Many bookings also come from secretaries that are reserving tables for their bosses.

In terms of how big the market is, we do know that around 62% of UK consumers are searching the web to decide which restaurant to visit, according to a study conducted by the American Express Hospitality Monitor last year. So that’s a lot of people deciding which restaurant to book online.

Our mission is to make sure that when people have made that decision, our services are in front of them. We focus on a B2B model, rather than spending a large marketing fund on creating an audience for our own site. We focus on people that already have the audience and visitors that are willing to book.

Read the rest of the article at e-consultancy...

Restaurant Online Marketing Workshops

According to the American Express Hospitality Monitor, 62% of customers search the Internet to decide which restaurant to visit.

If you are in the restaurant business, there's a great new free workshop that you can go to start learning about how to get your business online. Not only is online marketing now an essential part of the marketing mix, but it is the most cost effective and successful form of marketing that a restaurant can engage in.

Livebookings Network are running a series of workshops around the UK, focusing on providing practical advice to restaurateurs on the topic of online marketing.


London, Thursday 24 April

Topics being covered...

Email Marketing - Creating and measuring email campaigns to your existing restaurant customers, capturing valuable data and delivering promotions.
Expert speaker: Matthew Kirby, UK Managing Director, Fishbowl Marketing, www.fishbowluk.com

Search Engine Marketing - Basics and benefits of search engine optimisation for restaurants looking to attract traffic to their websites and capture more customers as a result of improved search engine rankings.
Expert speaker: Warren Cowen, Chief Executive Officer, greenlight search engine marketing, www.greenlightsearch.com

Effective Web Design - Implementing effective web design, the importance of maintenance and maximising opportunities available through your website.
Expert speaker: Keith Davie, Creative Director, Salad Creative, www.saladcreative.com

Time: 9.30am coffee, croissants and networking
10am start – 11.30am
Venue: Slug and Lettuce, 80-82 Wardour St, London, W1F 0TF
Cost: FREE to Livebookings Network members. Membership is free.
£25+VAT for non-members (includes breakfast)

If you sign up to the Livebookings Network on the day, you are refunded the cost of your Workshop place.

Booking: Book Online: www.livebookings.co.uk/workshops

News: Livebookings Network wins £6.5 million of investment led by Balderton Capital

Online restaurant marketing and reservations will be boosted by new investment.

Today, Livebookings Network welcomed a £6.5 million financial injection led by leading global VC firm Balderton Capital.

This investment will add fuel to Livebookings’ drive for international growth and will strengthen plans to recruit talent from countries all over the world. The funds will also be used to build the success founded in existing markets (UK and Nordics), in addition to the development of Livebookings’ tech infrastructure.

Niklas Ekland, CEO says “With this investment, we can further expand our partner network and extend our reach as hungry guests go online to make their next reservation.”

London-based Balderton Capital is one of Europe’s largest venture capital organisations, with an investment strategy focussed on finding and helping talented entrepreneurs build great companies.

Notable investments include

• Bebo (the leading social networking site)
  
• Betfair (online betting exchange)
  
• Codemasters (video games developer and publisher)
  
• Habbo Hotel (teen social networking site)
  
• MySQL (open-source database business)
  
• Setanta Sports (the European sports broadcaster)
  

Tim Bunting (partner at Balderton Capital) said, "Livebookings is a fantastic, easy-to-use service for the restaurant sector. By bringing together
booking agents, restaurants and diners, it fulfils a vital reservations and marketing role. We’re really looking forward to working with the Livebookings team as it builds the business across Europe.”

The Livebookings Network is a global marketing and real-time restaurant booking service. With millions of reservations made since its conception in 2001, Livebookings has successfully welcomed almost 17,000 restaurants into the network.

There will be more than a few million reservations made in the next few years. Watch this space...

Growth In Online Restaurant Reservations - Why?

What is driving the increase in online reservations for restaurants?

Demand is being driven from both customers and from restaurants.

From Customers

From calls to clicks, the world is changing. According to The 2007 American Express Hospitality Monitor 62% of UK consumers search the internet to decide which restaurant to visit. Restaurants, that’s over half your potential customer base.

When they find the restaurant they want, how do they book? How they book and how they want to book are two different things. Many customers book on the phone because they have to. Restaurants that can be booked online are booked online. Why? Because web booking is quick, it’s easy, and it’s free.

From Restaurants

The phone is great. But wouldn’t it be good if the phone only rang when you are there and when you’re not busy? The worst time to take a booking by phone is when you’re at your busiest.

The best time to take a booking online however is anytime. Anytime means: when you’re closed as well as when you are too busy to answer the phone. You can’t answer the phone 24 hours a day 7 days a week, but the internet is open for business anytime.

Looking at our 2007 data, at Livebookings Network we've found that 18% of online bookings are made between 10pm and 10am - that’s 18% of bookings you might have otherwise lost. On the other hand, 44% of online bookings are made during busy service times. The most popular hour of the day to make a booking online is between 1 and 2pm - that’s when you want to be focussed on service, not answering the phone.

More and more customer reservations behaviour is changing and the internet is proving to be an important channel that is being adopted by both restaurants and their customers in increasing numbers.

Yahoo Email and the Social Graph

One of the big stories this year will be how the "social graph" becomes liberated from destination sites such as Facebook.

I am current a "member" of at least 5 to 10 online networks of significance to me, from LinkedIn, to Facebook, to my local cycling club, not to mention my Skype list, my email contacts and my IM contacts.

Many of my contacts exist in all of these lists, some in one but not another. My "social graph" is actually still quite fragmented.

It would make sense therefore to liberate my networks from these applications and sites and allow them to be used across ANY online community that I want to be a part of. I would just need to be able to tag the status of a contact as being a friend, a professional contact, a family member or anything else I want. Then I could drag a tagged list to any application on any device. That's where we need to get to.

In order to do so, someone, somewhere is going to figure out
1. How to extract the social graph from the applications
2. Make money from doing so

Google's strategy in this area is with it's "Open Social" project. Facebook has Facebook, Microsoft has MySpace.

Yahoo are hot on their heels.

Yesterday at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Jerry Yang from Yahoo presented Yahoo's ambition to become the start point of choice for consumers by adding social networking power to Yahoo mail (currently the world's largest email supplier with over 250m users).

Yang said. “At Yahoo we want to be most essential starting point for your life,” and “take the complexity of the Web and simplify your life through very powerful technologies.”

The new Yahoo user experience will centre on Yahoo Mail and will integrate email, social context, tagging and a whole host of "Web 2.0" features.

The "Friends" in the Facebook world are just your "Contacts" from your email address lists. Based on the frequency of your contacts, email can be ordered in terms of social importance rather than say date.

3rd party apps can be accessed in the same interface giving the opportunity for friends to collaborate

Yang an example of planning a dinner. You would drag the thread into a map and it will bring up the profiles of those on the mail, note preferences (for food in this case) and suggest restaurants in the area. You can also take an email message, pop up the profiles of those on the message, takes an address from email and show it a map.

That's great. A collaborative decision making tool for a group of people to book a restaurant.

However, wouldn't it be even better if the social graph required to do this were not hard-wired into Yahoo. Or into Facebook for that matter?

Surely the application "restaurant booker" should be platform neutral and could exist on the web, on a desktop, on a mobile or a TV, and that the social graph that powers the "connections" would be transcendent and available for any developer to use.

Maybe, if Yahoo opened up their social graph to as an API for developers to use (and maybe charge a tiny fee to make it worth their while), we might have what we need.



News source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=7503, by Dan Farber & Larry Dignan

Tripadvisor, Facebook and Restaurants

Restaurant reviews on Facebook with Tripadvisor.

Towards the end of last year, Tripadvisor launched a Facebook application called Local Picks.

As I write this, on Tripadvisor there are 252,835 restaurants worldwide and 823,248 reviews already written.

Wow. That's a lot of restaurants and a lot of reviews.

So... is it any good?

Well, according to Facebook, there are 25,297 daily active users. I noticed however that this is down from the 100,000+ daily users that they were gaining a few weeks ago. I guess that's partly down to the holiday season. Also, it could have had a wave of adoption and is now slowing to a natural plateau of stickiness. Personally I can see myself using it once in a while, but not every day. I mean, I eat out a fair amount, probably once a week, but even that wouldn't warrant a daily visit. Maybe once or twice a month.

Anyway, I thought I'd add it to my Facebook account and try it out.

• Is it easy to start using?
• Is it easy to add a review?
• What about restaurants that are not already listed?
• How significant is the social angle?
• How useful is it for choosing a restaurant?
• Can I book online?

Is it easy to start using?

Overall, it's pretty intuitive. The design is simple and easy to use. Nothing too flashy or complex. Nice. The only think that threw me is that although it recognised my hometown to be London (from my Facebook profile), it still set the default map view to be Boston, USA. Once I'd saved my settings and re-started the app from the menu, it got it right.

So - I get a map of London and a list of top rated restaurants listed below it. I couldn't really see much on the map. There were apparently 1690 restaurants in London, although only the top 20 show on the map. Also, the map markers were a discreet grey (not the usual red I expect on a Google mash-up). I figured out after a while that you need to zoom in to see the detail. I mean, if you had 1690 map markers, there would be no map left!

I zoomed to my local area and saw 4 restaurants. I know for a fact that there are about 20 restaurants in our area. 20% coverage is OK, but it still has a way to go.


Is it easy to add a review?

Yes - very easy. All you need to do is to rate the restaurant on a scale of 1 to 5 stars by clicking the star. You can also choose if this is a "Favorite" (Shame - why can't they use "Favourite" for us Limeys?), and whether this is a place you "Want to go". You can also add free text.

As with all questionnaires, the more detailed the questions, the lower response rate, but the better quality of data. Conversely, the easier the questionnaire, the less meaningful the data. In this case, because you can just rate a restaurant and not leave a comment or state the reason why, it's difficult to know why a restaurant does so well or does not do well.

I should think that a rating for a business lunch would be very different to a rating for a night out with friends, a family lunch, a romantic date or a pre-theatre meal. Speed of service, childcare facilities, wine lists, atmosphere, food quality and choice - these all matter to greater and lesser extents depending on the occasion.

In terms of adding a review - yes - it's very easy. Too easy maybe?


What about restaurants that are not already listed?

I wanted to add a review to a restaurant that I enjoy visiting regularly, but found that it was not listed.

I could enter the details of the restaurant, starting with the name and the address. In my example the address was not recognised from the postcode, so I had to manually pinpoint the location on the map. There were a couple of other screens to go through after the address screen.

I was all set add my review. Too bad then that I now have to wait 24 to 48 hours before restaurant is added to the listings.


How significant is the social angle?

Right or wrong, I trust my friends more than I trust the rest of the unknown folks in the world. So - if I can get reviews from my friends for restaurants, because I know them, what they like and who they are, I can "trust" their reviews more than an anonymous user. Good idea then.

To be honest I'm not a heavy Facebook user. I don't have that many "friends" registered and only one of those has the application on their account. However, the idea seems to make sense. Every time I am shown a restaurant review, it shows me the reviews from "everyone" and from "friends".

My reviews are added to a page called "My Picks". My friends "picks" are listed on a separate page.

For the social angle to really work, all my friends that I regularly eat out with would need to add this app to their profile and we'd all need to rate restaurants as we visit them.

I really doubt that many Facebook users actually use it in this collaborative way.

Still, it makes sense that you start off using the app by yourself, get reviews from the wider world and then as your friends start using it, get their opinions too.


How useful is it for choosing a restaurant?

Say I just use the app to help me find restaurants. How useful is it?

On all of the three primary filters (Geographic, cuisine and price, see below), you then get to see restaurants listed by highest rated (either by friends or by everyone). You can also choose by most ratings, most favorites or most want to gos.

Geographic. Well, I can zoom on the map very easily. If I want to find a restaurant near a certain place, it's great. Many restaurant search tools still could do better in this area, so top marks here.

Cuisine type. Yup, good filter here if I am after a certain cuisine type.

Price range. Shame this is in dollars for some of the restaurants in London. Because of that I'm not sure how much I trust it to be honest.

One more thing I'd really like is to be able to filter on are some of the restaurant attributes such as business, child friendly, outdoor seating, romantic etc. These are all features offered when you list a restaurant, so it would be good to be able to search by these too.


Can I book online?

Alas, no. It seems that the good old telephone still rules for most these restaurants.

Some have website links though, which is a good start.


Overall impressions

Overall, this application seems to deliver on volume and spread. Almost all major cities have a decent spread of restaurants listed. Where it lacks (I feel) as a truly useful decision making tool, is the level of detail available against each restaurant.

So, to improve?

1. Make it so you could easily rate the restaurant on a number of additional factors such as:
- menu
- service
- atmosphere
- comfort
- wine list
- value for money

2. Add further clarification on suitability for categories such as
- families
- business lunches
- romantic setting
- party atmosphere

3. Enable searches and filtering on the following dimensions
- Geographic (done)
- Price range (done)
- Cuisine type (done)
- Occasion categories (see point 2 above)
- Ratings (done)
- Sub ratings (see point 1 above)
- Friends ratings (done)

This would really create a very powerful restaurant recommendation engine.

Finally, add a facility to link to a restaurant's website or some other way of enabling a booking. Tripadvisor would want to figure out how make this lead generation pay for itself with whoever they partnered with to deliver the booking interface.

Even better, add a tool that allows friends to collaborate over the decision making for the restaurant, and once booked sends all of them the confirmation details.

There you'd have it. A truly one stop socially enabled decision making and booking system.

Good effort from Tripadvisor.

Once again, another step towards distributed, user centred content and a step away from destination sites.

Everyscape - 3D Restaurant Interiors

Just saw this new site in beta. www.everyscape.com

Defintely worth checking out. It's a mapping site with a difference. You can browse a location as if you are inside it. You can walk into a restaurant in New York City and walk past the diners to the back, turn around and walk out again. Kind of like those 3D virtuals tours. Nothing new right? Wrong. This time you get to walk out the resturant, along the street and check out another building by going in the front door. Very cool.

You also get to see the 2D map to the right in a side panel to see where you are walking.

They've got trial versions of 4 US cities at the moment.

There's some pretty interesting revenue opportunities here for them if it takes off. Hoteliers, ticket brokers, restaurant booking agents, travel agents, they'll all want to get linked it if gets critical mass.