Forkly: The Ultimate Eating Out App?

by ZAC on August 24, 2011

Why is that the food and technology go together so well?

Is it all the picture taking? The uploading and commenting? The bloviating? The useful tips our friends leave for us around town, alerting us to can’t miss dishes and off-the-menu gems? Or is it because in cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco there are just so many great options that figuring out where we want to go each evening is becoming an impossible task? Or is it simply that going out to dinner, sitting around a table, communing with our loved ones, having our senses seduced and enlivened by professionals simply lends itself to sharing?

Whichever the answers, Forkly, a new and promising looking app, seems like one of the more ambitious apps in the food space: with something for everyone.

As you can plainly see, Forkly is aiming pretty big here. For the casual user they promise to be THE app used for food discovery, organizing what dishes we want to try and where, the ability to share our food and drink patterns and “earn influence points.” You can see that Forkly is trying to fold in, like an omelette, all the best things that other apps such as Zagat, Foursquare, UrbanSpoon and many more. Their ambition to encourage users to become “influencers,” presumably which would win them free meals and discounts, tastings and other offers down the line is something that we’ll need to observe over the coming months.

Recently, Klout has been rapidly improving its service, upgrading its user interface and doubling down on rewards for its digital mavens. Can this work soley in a niche like food?

Forkly: Brands, Bloggers and Businesses

For brands and businesses such as bars, restaurants, catering halls, food trucks and the like, Forkly has a lot to offer. First and foremost the vaunted “analytics dashboard” (ooooo) that allows businesses to “understand who draws the most influence at your establishmennt….and help you build lasting loyal relationships with patrons.” Presumably so business owners can take said influencers out to a strip club in order to thank them. I kid cause I love.

Forkly is also offering the ability to control and personalize your restaurant’s menus based “on patron’s taste.” Not sure how they are going to do that, and this seems like another step in the direction of tailoring and customizing our experiences specifically to our tastes, which is either technology making our lives earlier, or another sign of just how fat, lazy and stupid we’ve become that we can’t even decide what to eat.

Which brings us perfectly to the bloggers: Forkly promises to be a major tool in the arsenal of countless bloggers. Enabling bloggers to “embed tastes into your blog,” Forkly is paying the blogging community a great amount of respect. And by clearly acknowledging that many bloggers are influencers among their friends and communtiy, they’ve highlighted those aspects of the app and platform.

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