Company: Dinnerbuzz Launched: June 2005 What is it? Dinnerbuzz is a new service that allows users to provide feedback on restaurants, bars and coffee shops. It leverages user-provided metadata (including tagging) to allow others to easily find and read content on restaurants. In their own words, “Dinnerbuzz is designed to make it easier for you to find a place for dinner (and drinks) (or coffee). It’s a social guide to restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. When you post, your tags are shared with everyone. Tags make it easy to find places you might not have known about before. And since Dinnerbuzz enables you to filter tags locally, finding interesting places (and people) has never been quicker!” Link So, what we have with Dinnerbuzz is a new social networking site that leverages user tagging. tangent begins… We note two emerging trends in the web 2.0 space. The first trend is the huge proliferation of new social networks/tagging services and the difficulty as a user in keeping up. The second trend is the “problem” with user tagging. With regard to the first trend, we’ve all been thinking about it, and John Battelle pointed it out in a recent post (discussed here previously) – “it’s a pain in the ass to keep creating social networks, maintaining groups, tagging, sharing, etc. It’s a habit I’m not sure the masses will ever get into, at least in a way that is driven by pure selflessness.” The second trend is the “problem” with user tagging. People need an incentive or they just won’t do it (see our profiles on CelebrityFlicker and feedster – “if a web 2.0 service is going to add user tagging, especially anonymous user tagging, they better provide one heck of a good incentive for users to do it (see Delicious, Furl, etc.) or else they will get bad data.”) These will sort themselves out over time, with winners and losers, but new companies thinking of adding these features, or basing themselves on them, need to think forward or risk being a loser. Back to Dinnerbuzz: Is there an incentive for user tagging? We’ll wait and see. …tangent ends Reader Experience: Anyone can search Dinnerbuzz for restaurants and read reviews. There are a number of great search options. Every city has a set page, and from there searches can be done by tag (like “mexican”) and/or rating (up to 10). Once a sufficient → Read More