MNN - Mother Nature Network

I have a varied group of friends on Facebook. Friends from childhood, my years at summer camp, college roommates, other parents from my town, people I’ve written with here on MNN and other online sites, church friends … Not all of those people really care about what I ate last night when I went out to dinner.

 

But some of them are interested in knowing what and where I ate, and what I thought of it. Those friends can follow my eating out adventures on Foodspotting, and find out when I eat something really fabulous like the antipasto platter that I had last night. Foodspotting is the social networking website where restaurant dishes, not the restaurants themselves, are featured.

 

Here’s how it works: you sign up for a free Foodspotting account. When you’re at a restaurant, take photos of the foods you’re eating (and you’re friends are eating) with your phone or a digital camera. If you have a smartphone, you can use the Foodspotting app to immediately upload the photo of the dish, along with where you’re eating it and a few words about it.

 

 

If you don’t have a smartphone, you can download the photos onto you computer when you get home and then upload them to the Foodspotting website.

 

I really don’t want to bombard my Facebook friends with a lot of my foodie habits. I imagine they might find endless photos of what I’ve eaten a bit obnoxious. However, if I wanted to, I could connect Foodspotting to Facebook. I can also be connected to Twitter, FourSquare and other social sites.

 

One of the things I really like about Foodspotting is that one of its goals is to be positive. One of their guiding principles is “Only the foods people love.” They encourage users to post photos of the foods they loved to let others know what’s good at various restaurants, not what’s bad.

 

Do you use Foodspotting? What do you like about it?