When I'm looking for a restaurant in NY, I often turn to New York Magazine's reviews because they are concise and when they pick a restaurant it's usually pretty good, imho of course.
But, when it's time to order a delivery, and having food delivered is a way of life in NYC, I'm stuck using the reviews at Seamless or Delivery. Let me just say that the tastes of their users and mine are not the same. I'd much rather eat food from NYMag-recommended restaurants.
So could we please have a melding of good criticism and a great commerce website? Integration would be fantastic, not only with restaurants but with movie listings. I like to use movies.google.com. Unfortunately the reviewers they link to from each movie are, again, not my favorites. For that I go to the NY Times, mostly. I'm learning to use other sources now that I have a movies river, thanks to NakedJen's recommendations of movie review sites, and an evening I spent browsing around a month ago.
Hey why not hook in Amazon's recommendation engine. That's what Chris Dixon and Caterina Fake were working on at Hunch. "Here are some nearby restaurants we bet you'd like." You gotta know the world is going that way.
I guess the bottom line is there's still a lot of integration to do among the various data sources on the net.
PS: Don't forget OpenTable. :-)
PPS: One more thing -- can we get an RSS feed for Frank Rich's columns. It's a serious omission. Thanks. :-)
There are two ways to approach this.
One is by getting the supply side to provide new (or better) services and to better syndicate and integrate their existing ones.
The other is by equipping the demand side — customers: you and me — with our own tools and services for expressing demand directly. Without those, we're stuck with lots of MLOTT: Money Left On The Table. (And food off of it.)
In the VRM development community, we started out calling the latter category "Personal RFPs," but in the last few months we've started calling it Intentcasting. (Scott Adams of Dilbert fame calls it "broadcast shopping.")
A partial list of intentcasting developers is listed here.
An intentcasting scenario ten years hence is described in my Wall Street Journal essay from July. Let's make it sooner than that. :-)
;)
