The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘directory’

As more consumers turn to sites like Yelp and Citysearch to find restaurants, it’s important for establishments of all sizes to have a website. While larger restaurants may have more resources to create an informative consumer-facing site, the mom and pop restaurants out there need an easy way to create a presence online. GrabMyTable is hoping to be a resource for restaurants to create websites easily as well as a restaurant discovery platform for consumers. We have free lifetime subscriptions for the first five TechCrunch readers and restaurateurs who sign up for GrabyMyTable here.

GrabMyTable was designed with the small restaurant owner in mind who doesn’t have the time or money to put into developing an established site but still wants to maintain an informative website. The platform lets administrators with no HTML knowledge create a site with contact details, photos and videos, menus, specials, and even lets users add a customer review system that can be controlled by the site’s administrator. The service costs $60 per month per site. The startup is also including a consumer-facing directory of all sites created with its technology broken down by city/regional area.

Of course, for the directory to be useful for consumers, GrabMyTable’s technology needs to be widely adopted by restaurants all over the world. In this space, the site will have trouble competing with Yelp, Citysearch and others which already have established marketshare in the listings and review areas. Plus, OpenTable is the go-to resource for bookings while Menupages.com lets users access menu for most restaurants in their coverage areas. Letseat.at also offers an easy portal for restaurants to create websites, but its offering is free.

While GrabMyTable faces stiff competition from a variety of sources, the site has experience on its side. The startup’s parent, iFoods Limited owns and operates several other food-focused websites including Twecipe.com, Lookandtaste.com. Vidvend, and foodandfizz.com.

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If you’ve ever spent much time working from the command line, there’s a good chance you’re going to love TweetShell, a new Twitter client that replicates the terminal environment in the browser. No, it isn’t very user-friendly — if you’ve never heard of commands like ls or man you’re going to be totally lost here, but if you can hold your own in a Bash shell you’re going to be right at home. (Note: while the site is called TweetShell, the URL is Tweetsh.com.

To get started, it’s probably a good idea to run the man command to get a list of the site’s main features. TweetShell just launched a few hours ago so it’s buggy and is missing some common Twitter functionality, but it has most of the basics: you can login using either OAuth or the ‘old’ less secure way, you can tweet from your account using the wall command, and you can browse through tweets from other users using the directory commands like cd and ls. There are also a number of more advanced commands, though frankly I haven’t been able to figure out how some of them work (feel free to leave tips in the comments).

Of course, there are already a number of Twitter clients that actually run from the terminal, but this runs from the browser, which means it’s more accessible for casual use and you can access it from any computer.

Thanks to Habib Haddad for the tip.

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When Robert Scoble, lover of all things web, says something is lame, you know it must be really lame. And that’s what he’s saying about a new Yahoo site, Know Your Mojo! — and he’s right.

The site claims to tell you what kind of “social mojo” you possess by analyzing your tweets. It’s a very simple site, below the big “What’s Your Social Mojo?” question it asks you to put in your Twitter username. You then hit the submission button and it takes you through an animation of a series of pipes. You’re spit on on the other end with what kind of Twitter user you are. The only problem? It’s different just about every time you put in your user name.

Of the 16 different mojo possibilities, I’ve gotten 3 different ones on 4 attempts. Scoble notes similar results. So I don’t know what kind of analyzing it’s doing, but it doesn’t appear to work too well. Of course, that doesn’t really matter because what this is really about is advertising Yahoo’s new homepage. It makes that pretty clear on the results page that tells you to feed your “mojo” by checking out Yahoo’s site and adding content to it.

While all of that has actually nothing to do with Twitter, Yahoo clearly made a Twitter analyzer to take advantage of the viral nature of the service, hoping the masses would tweet out their results and get more people to visit the site, and then Yahoo’s homepage. Sadly, it will probably work, even if the analyzer itself doesn’t.

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We knew it was coming, but we weren’t sure when. We’ve gotten word that Facebook’s Verified Apps initiative, long awaited by developers since the program was first announced last year, is finally ready for the masses. Developers are getting notified that their approved applications will soon be highlighted with green check marks next to their names starting tomorrow.

Here are some of the other details we’ve gathered:

• In thanks for their participation in the platform (and likely because of the long wait), developers are receiving extra Facebook advertising coupons.
• While an application’s Verified status lasts for a year, Facebook will be continuously monitoring Verified Apps for any deviation from the program’s requirements and Platform’s Terms of Service
• Facebook will be heavily marketing the Verified Apps program. The company will be rolling out a video to Facebook members describing the benefits of the program and approved applications, and applications will be prominently featured in the Facebook application directory.

The purpose of the Verified Apps program is to help Facebook highlight the cream of the crop of Facebook Platform, which has previously had issues separating the good applications from the bad. Developers pay a $375 annual fee to participate, and in return they’re given a badge meant to inspire user trust, as well as priority placement in the application directory.

Now that the directory is ready to go live, it will be up to Facebook to convince users why these approved applications are better than others. That may not be as easy as it sounds (especially if some of their favorite apps aren’t granted approval), so expect a heavy dose of “educational” advertising and promotion as Facebook brings everyone up to speed. Verified Apps will play a key role going forward for Facebook Platform, especially once Facebook’s payment system goes live and users have to decide where they should be comfortable spending their money.

Thanks to “Kilgore Trout” for the tip.

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