Foodspotting

» see foodspotting.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i missed foodspotting. foodie photo apps were us-coded products that needed two layers i did not have at the time. an iphone with a data plan in 2010-2012, and a city dense enough with annotated restaurants that opening the map would actually show you something nearby. ankara in those years had neither. by the time my phone could have done the thing, instagram was already doing it for everyone everywhere.

foodspotting launched publicly in march 2010 in san francisco, with a private beta running from late 2009. the founders were alexa andrzejewski as ceo, soraya darabi as cmo, and ted grubb as engineering lead. the angle was dish-level discovery rather than restaurant-level review. a user opened the app, took a photo of a specific menu item, tagged it with the dish name, and the photo would float up to other users searching for that dish near them. you were searching for ramen, not for ramen-place.

the design caught a wave. travel and lifestyle press covered the app heavily through 2011 and 2012. the company raised around 5 million from kbs ventures and others, with high-profile angel investments from people like alexis ohanian. by mid-2012 the app had crossed three million photos across about 200 cities. the api was opened to third parties. a guides feature let chefs and celebrities curate dish lists for their cities.

~ the case file ~

~ how opentable killed it ~

opentable acquired foodspotting on 29 january 2013 for around 10 million in cash. the strategic case was that opentable could pair its reservation network with a dish-discovery layer, surfacing photos of specific menu items above the reservation booking interface. that integration did not happen at the depth that was promised. opentable kept the foodspotting brand alive but stopped investing in the app. the last meaningful ios update was in early 2014. by 2015 the experience was effectively frozen, with the user community thinning each year.

in early may 2018 opentable emailed users that foodspotting would be shutting down and offered a window to download a personal archive of photos and check-ins. the shutdown date was 25 may 2018. the app stopped working, the website returned a notice, and the dish database disappeared from the public web. opentable had bought a community and then let it run on a timer for five years.

~ what carried over ~

instagram is the obvious successor in user behavior. by 2015 a photo of a specific dish was a normal instagram post with the restaurant geotagged in the location field, and the discovery happened through hashtags and the explore tab. foodspotting had been right about the use case and wrong about the audience needing a separate app for it. once the camera-roll-to-social flow was solved by a more general product, the special-purpose foodie app could not justify the install. the same pattern killed gowalla in the location-checkin space and untappd's earlier competitors in beer.

the founders went on to other things. alexa andrzejewski moved into design consulting and writing. soraya darabi cofounded transparent collective and later trustworthy ventures. the foodspotting domain was retired and the company's twitter account stopped posting in 2018. the photos themselves, three million of them, are not preserved on the live web in any consolidated archive.

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