Urbanspoon

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

~ the obit ~

urbanspoon was a restaurant app for a list of cities i did not live in. the database covered the english-speaking west and never really grew past it. that meant the app shipped in the turkish iphone store but had nothing inside it when you opened it in ankara. the shake feature would spin and land on a restaurant in seattle or sydney, which was funny once and not useful twice. urbanspoon was a product of the early app store era when half the apps were geographically tied to wherever the founders had eaten lunch.

the company was founded in august 2006 by ethan lowry with two ex-jobster co-founders. all three had been engineers at the same early-2000s recruiting startup and left to build a restaurant-discovery site for seattle. the original web product was useful in a normal yelp-competitor way. what made it famous was the iphone app, which shipped in 2008 right at the start of the app store and presented restaurant choice as a slot-machine reel. you pulled the lever, three cylinders spun, and the app picked dinner for you.

iac bought urbanspoon in april 2009 for an undisclosed price. zomato, the indian restaurant-discovery brand that had been buying competitors across the world, bought it from iac in january 2015. zomato kept the seattle office for about a quarter, then shut down the urbanspoon website on june 1 2015 and redirected all the traffic to zomato.com. the engineering team was let go by august. the slot-machine ui never moved to the zomato app. it would have felt out of place there.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually did ~

the core function was a database of restaurants with ratings and user reviews. the differentiator was the shake-to-pick mechanic. you set filters for things like cuisine or price, locked the ones you wanted, and shook the phone until the unlocked reels stopped on a place you had not been to. this was a good answer to the "where should we eat" problem in a city you knew well. it was a useless answer in a city you did not, since random choice across an unfamiliar map was just gambling.

~ how it ended ~

the zomato acquisition was the discount-bin sale at the end of urbanspoon's run. iac had bought the company at the peak of the local-discovery hype in 2009 and had been quietly losing ground to yelp and google maps for years. zomato wanted urbanspoon's restaurant database and its anglosphere market access, not the brand or the slot-machine ui. once the data was migrated, the urbanspoon brand had no reason to keep existing. the june 2015 redirect was clean and the announcement was a single blog post that thanked the seattle team and pointed everyone at the zomato app.

~ what survived ~

the shake-to-pick mechanic outlived the brand. food-decision apps in the years after kept reinventing the same dice-roll interaction with worse animation. the design pattern of "filters at the top with a random-pick button in the middle" became a small genre of dinner-roulette apps that exist on every app store and never really break out. urbanspoon's bigger inheritance was the city-by-city database structure that yelp eventually copied. the slot-machine animation itself has not aged well, which is part of why nobody bothered to bring it back.

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