Foodspotting and Yelp has new restaurant-finding and review competition: Chewsy

One of the best examples of how mobile devices are changing our lives is Foodspotting (my account is here). What does this do? It lets you see photos of meals taken near you as a way to find new restaurants. I find it more compelling than Yelp or Google as a way to find new restaurants to try. It also is a good way to capture your own meals as a historical record of what you eat.

Now a new company, Chewsy, comes along that says “well, Foodspotting is pretty cool, but it’s missing some things.” Here you can hear co-founders Chaitanya Sareen and Trevin Chow explain what Chewsy does. First, it’s only on iOS for the moment (they are planning on coming to other platforms) and they just released a new version this morning, that makes Chewsy much more social than it was previously.

The biggest difference from Foodspotting you’ll notice about Chewsy is that it has reviews on the photos, which helps you communicate with your friends whether a dish actually was good or not or totally sucked. These reviews were written by other Chewsy members. One problem: many towns don’t have many photos or reviews. It shows the chicken and egg problem many app developers face and why I still find I start up Foodspotting more times than Chewsy, but Chewsy is improving as more people try it and put reviews in.

Anyway, these two apps are changing how I find restaurants and it’s great to see competition so that both are pushed to add new features to make dining out even better for all of us.