If you search Facebook for "restaurants" you currently find 29 applications you can add to your profile. You find some of the usual suspects there such as CHOW and TripAdvisor (as usual a strong North American dominance) but also projects created by niched sites and enthusiasts who must see Facebook as an incredibly strong delivery mechanism to potentially reach thousands of users.
Obviously I haven't gone through all of the tools on offer, but two of them have caught my eye lately based on the simple fact that they offer online bookings. They are both simply called "Restaurants" (to distinguish them their URLs contain the application names "mygoodeats" and "restaurantbookings" respectively), one of them developed by a North American company called "Hungry Machine" and the other by a guy in London named Anthony Eskinazi.
Restaurants and dining out doesn't so far seem to be very big on Facebook when it comes to usage, few of the applications listed have more than 200 daily active users. Anthony seems to have gotten a headstart with 165 daily users currently reported while the Hungry Machine app so far is still in the single digit range. As we know, on Facebook traffic numbers can change very quickly though...
To me personally, restaurant information, favorites, sharing tips and reviews with friends, picking a restaurant and setting up dates to book and go out for dinner seems like a no brainer. What is more social and networking oriented than the communal sharing of great food and drink?
Maybe one limiting factor is the difficulty of synchronizing your friends and setting up an event with actually securing a booking. First you must think of a restaurant, maybe even a specific promotion they have on like "35% off the food bill", set a date and figure out which of your friends can come. Once they have all RSVPd through Facebook's event organizer you need to secure a booking on the restaurant; what if they don't have enough seats on the night and time you organized for? Find a different promotion or time, decide a different date or find another restaurant...?
Of course it can be turned around so you first make a booking for a number of people, and then you message your friends and see who wants to go. But what if you don't fill the booking, hardly fair to the restaurant.
Still seems easier to do the whole negotiation bit over the phone or IM and then just pop off to Time Out, Best London Restaurants, Toptable or OpenTable to make the actual booking. The whole social networking web site thing actually makes it more complicated, not less, to make a booking...
What I'd really like though, is a simple Facebook restaurants application that lets me share tips with friends, search reviews and find inspiration on restaurants in my area and areas I am about to travel to or go to frequently. It should alert me, for example through my news feed, about new restaurants in my subscribed areas. Based on that information I would want to create favorite lists of restaurants and lists of restaurants to go to in the future, and be alerted of any offers and promotions coming up. And of course be able to book them quickly and easily with my registered Facebook details already filled in.
Right. Wish I had a week or two to spare.
URL: Restaurant Reviews on Facebook - The Unofficial Facebook Blog
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