Foodspotting Hits A Million Downloads, Celebrates By Upping The Gluttony

I remember when I first wrote about Foodspotting a year and a half ago. At the time, nearly everyone I knew was using various social networks to share pictures of their food. Foodspotting was a service built around that very idea. That alone may have been enough, but the broader goal behind the photo-sharing was always food discovery.

Today, the service has hit one million downloads of their food discovery applications. And to celebrate, they’re upping the social connections within the app with a new “Follow” tab. From here, you’ll be able to more quickly find and follow your friends (and food experts) who are also using Foodspotting. And you’ll also be able to follow specific foods and restaurants all in one stream.

The ability to follow people, places, and foods has existed on Foodspotting’s website for a while, but the apps are the keys to the service. Foodspotting co-founder and CEO Alexa Andrzejewski says they noticed people weren’t just launching the app when they were hungry, they were launching it all throughout the day. Yes, the app now encourages more gluttony!

Of course, Foodspotting has a different take on the update. “People don’t trust apps, people trust people. Our goal was never to create another social network or photo sharing app. Instead, we’ve designed Foodspotting’s social elements to support the food-finding experience,” Andrzejewski says. “When you visit a new city or walk into a restaurant, you can see what a friend — or the Travel Channel — recommended there. With a growing user base and these social features, our vision of a lens-like app that reveals interesting things around you is becoming more and more real each day,” she continues.

Alongside a million downloads, Foodspotting now has over 720,000 reviews/photos on the service, we’re told.

The latest version of the app (2.5) is now live in the App Store here. And in the Android Market here. Foodspotting notes that they’re also beta testing a BlackBerry app built with a partner.