We already know that people love to share information with family, friends and stalkers, the biggest proof point is Facebook with more users than there are Americans.

Evolution from Information to Intelligence

The tools, which initially were just focused on spreading pictures, messages and videos are evolving into data streams that can be useful for businesses and not just for advertising. User experience designers live at the intersection of data and creativity. Their designs are increasingly exposing more hierarchical, semantic data. In other words, they are becoming more readable by programs and algorithms and that makes them more useful overall. The challenge of data architects and a user experience designers is to strike a balance between flexibility and overall usefulness.

Business Intelligence tools have many important distinctions. Two of these are that they allow business users to answer questions that are relevant to their goals and they allow them to explore the data to answer the questions  by answering the initial questions. We used to use terms like cubes, hierarchies and slicing and dicing, but it’s better to just do these things without making users need to think about the functionality.

Foodspotting as a Unique Social Network

In FoodSpotting I can follow people, dishes and places because of a well managed taxonomy. That’s right. You can follow content just like people! This allows me to:

• keep track of foods my friends like
• make new friends and learn about new places via dishes that I like
• learn about dishes that inspire people in places that I like or want to try

Foodspotting as a Business Intelligence Tool

Questions can be answered like:

• Who likes my restaurant?
• What do they like about my restauraunt?
• What are the most popular dishes at my restaurant?
• Where else do the people who like my restaurant like to go?
• What dishes do they like at the other places?
• Who likes my competitor?
• What dishes do they like at my competitor?
• Do they like my restaurant too?
• How is my dish different from other versions on the dish?

Furthermore, most users are freely sharing their twitter accounts via Foodspotting. So now you can engage them and find out what it is that struck them about your dish and maybe even offer them an entree, side or (frosty, malt) beverage for their trouble. There’s your collision of business intelligence and social media. Now, about that beer…

What else can I do with Foodspotting?