Social Dining App Forkly Helps You Rate And Review Food

Forkly, which allows
you to rate and review menu items at restaurants and share your reviews
with your friends, has just launched its iPhone app.


You can tell the app whether you like an item, love it, think it’s
okay or is “not for me” and you can add a short review before sharing
your rating with your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. Rating items will
help Forkly build a profile of what you like and what you don’t — this
will help it provide recommendations of other menu items you may like.




You can follow other users to find out what they are eating (and what
they think of their meals) and you can bookmark something you would
like to try yourself by tapping the “want it” button. Similarly, you can
bookmark a place you want to try by tapping the “want to go here”
button.


The overall aim is to help you discover new restaurants and dishes to
try out and, when you are already at a restaurant, help you find out
which items on the menu are good before you order.


As you share your opinions about food and drinks, you can gain
influence points and see which other Forkly users you are influencing.
You can become the Top Influencer for both venues and menu items, which
somewhat gamefies the app.

  

Forkly is also trying to solve the initial problem of not having
anyone to follow as you sign up using your Twitter account — you will
need to have a Twitter account to use the app. You will then start to
follow all Forkly users you are also following on Twitter. However, I’m
not sure how effective this will be, since we don’t always follow people
on Twitter who live locally. Perhaps Facebook integration would have
been better here.


At launch, Forkly is also including some tools to help restaurants, brands and bloggers get the
most out of the app, so it seems that it may already have monetization
in mind.


At first glance, Forkly — which was developed by Martin May and Brady
Becker, 2 of the co-founders of Brightkite — is a nice looking app that could
provide a lot of value for people like me, who like to check out new
restaurants and try different dishes. It feels similar to Foodspotting, but is
actually more like Yelp in
that it focuses more on reviews — albeit reviews of specific dishes
rather than restaurants. Offering personalized recommendations is a nice
touch and the gamification should lead to a good level of engagement.


You can check out Forkly for yourself now by downloading the app on
your iPhone. Forkly is not available on the Android or BlackBerry platforms at
the time of this writing.