As Chris Crum reported last week, popular mobile app Urbanspoon updated and added a new feature. The new feature is called Dineline, and it allows users to record their dining experiences.
“It’s a way for people who love to eat out, who love restaurants, to record their dining history everyday,” said Kara Nortman, the Senior Vice President of Urbanspoon.
As Nortman explained, the app helps those people that are always trying to remember the name of a restaurant or what food they ordered at a particular place.
The Dineline feature allows users to check-in to a particular place and document any information or pictures that they want to remember from it. Nortman says it creates a “dining diary.”
What’s interesting is that Dineline also allows users to share this diary with others, which makes Urbanspoon a much more social experience. The app has always encouraged social interactions with its strong emphasis on restaurant “Likes” and reviews, and, according to Nortman, Dineline is just an “additional way to make the experience social” and to engage people through dining.
Urbanspoon currently allows users to share their experiences with others on Twitter, and Nortman indicated that a Facebook integration would likely take place in the near future.
At this point, the updated Urbanspoon is available on the Web and on the iOS platform. However, Nortman did tell us that we could expect an Android app soon.
Nortman also advised restaurants to take advantage of services such as Urbanspoon, Yelp, and Citysearch. She told us that consumers visit these sites and expect to find information on restaurants. For this reason, she said that restaurants should, at the very least, claim their profile pages on these sites to make sure they are being represented accurately. From there, she suggested that they add content to their page and utilize social channels.