I've always got a coffee/lunch/dinner date with someone and absolutely no preference as to where we meet. I need a Random Number Generator for food. Perhaps it could pull from the Yelp API. In a perfect world you can narrow your search by proximity to an address, keywords (lunch, Chinese), and open hours.
Dine-O-Matic, Wheel of Lunch, and A Place Between Us all exist, but suck, because they appear to draw from the same 10 restaurants.
Yes, location would be great!! I'm always trying to find a good new restaurant between where my mom works and where I work.... without walking the distance or spending an hour on anyone else's site.... How can I say pick a random place in this specific area...
The trick is finding a restaurant that is new and good for both people. Me thinks that narrows the list considerably. If you can get a high volume of reviews (or even this is better than that comparisons), a Netflix style recommendation engine might work out, but I think the easy route is to pick a few good restaurants and only recommend them. Good trumps new any day of the week... and twice on Sundays.
I like this idea a lot. Does anyone know if Yelp or a site like that has an API? If so, would be very cool to pull data from them, basically "Give me all restaurants above a 3 star rating that are within 5 miles of location X"
Theo wrote, "The trick is finding a restaurant that is new and good for both people." I'm not sure that the restaurant has to be new for both people...just good. But if it did have to be new for both people, you could track "accepted" recommendations against the people who accepted them (assumes there's a login/profile/identifier for all participants) and assume that they went to that place. You could do a "post-lunch follow-up" to have them say whether or not they rented and rate the restaurant, maybe say that's they'd go back or not.
I couldn't care less if the restaurant is new. I don't even really care if it's good. I just don't want to have to think about it.
When coordinating with someone, I always send them three options. I'd like to click a button three times and get those three options, then they can choose the ultimate place.
For nights at home when Damon and I can't decide what to eat, we could click until something random appeared that interested us both.
For a six-hour scope, this needs to be drop-dead simple.
How about introducing Human Intelligence here - we can use Amazon Mechanical Turk (http://aws.amazon.com/mturk) web service that will allow you to post question with some reward ($1.00 may be) and a worker (human) will respond - if you like the response, you go ahead and reward the worker and close the HIT (Human Intelligence Task)
Satyen - What would the assignments be? I don't trust paying someone to rate a restaurant X stars, and we already have the contact information (presumably up-to-date) from Yelp or Menuism.
Workers usually do good job (based on the experience so far) , but there is definitely a possibility of fraudulence in the system. So, one option is to qualify workers - like if you are looking for a restaurant in Portland area, you might require address should belong to such and such zip code and the worker must have lived there for such and such months / years and that way you can narrow down your selection criteria.
Then once you get the results, you can verify , maybe by checking with your friends or doing some research on your own or may be validating against the results from yelp API . Initially it might be little time consuming , but eventually you should get faster and quality results.
You can also create multiple HITs and select the result which was recommended by majority of the workers.
Bottom line, you can implement your own criteria to select the result.
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