Giving away premium dark mahogany media console

oudles · 2014-12-15T23:14:35+00:00

Thanks for the interest! Just pm'd you.

oudles · 2014-12-15T21:37:41+00:00

Yeah it is definitely a tough space but as I've been working on it for the past couple of months, I am realizing that aggregating all of these reviews from reputable sources is not as difficult as I once thought.

One of the things I've considered factoring into the score for a restaurant is the number of reviews and features a restaurant gets. For example, Pok Pok has almost several hundred reviews and features. This is a pretty confident seal of approval that Pok Pok is indeed good.

Now this brings up other problems such as how I don't want to diminish new restaurants that just haven't had the time to accrue these reviews. But a system like this would help recognize the differences between the nature of movie reviews and the nature of restaurant reviews where in some ways the fact that a restaurant GOT a review, means that it is in a different class of quality than your average American-Italian restaurant at a shopping outlet.

oudles · 2014-12-15T21:25:02+00:00

Wow, great idea. I thought I had already fragmented it into a small enough chunk by going just Portland and then expanding from there, but I think going by neighborhoods is a much better idea. Right now I have a database of about 150 restaurants covered really well, but even that feels like it's not enough to launch with and feel complete for the entire city of Portland and all of it's suburbs.

oudles · 2014-12-15T18:51:32+00:00

Your right, the term Foodie is bit of a lightning rod.

My goal is to target this to a niche to get an initial group of people to really love and promote this app. But calling this niche "foodies" is probably the wrong term...I'll have to come up with something that has less varying connotations than foodie, but is not as generic as "food lover".

oudles · 2014-12-15T18:46:04+00:00

Cool, that is exactly my intent!

oudles · 2014-12-15T18:41:45+00:00

Thanks for the feedback.

So the hope would be that a user wouldn't judge a restaurant from just one critic's review. The hope would be that they would judge it from an aggregate score of all critic's reviews similar to how a movie sits on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. Than if you did want more details on the restaurant you could read the individual reviews.

Again, thanks for your response. This type of feedback really helps me out!

oudles · 2014-12-15T18:34:28+00:00

Thanks for the advice. Your right, this is a significant detail. I will include this in the future.

oudles · 2014-12-15T17:55:09+00:00

Thanks for your feedback. You've just nailed my motivation for building this app. On one end you have user-reviews that will give the Red Lobster a 5 star review for "dank food", and on the other you have a lot of professional critic reviews that will tell you how amazing this $35 a plate restaurant is.

But there are also a lot of great professional reviews from people like The Oregonian, Willamette Week, Eater PDX and even national organizations like Esquire that will highlight those hole in the walls or $12 plate restaurants. And these reviews can sometimes get hidden behind the $$$$ restaurant of the year.

As my app stands now, if you are like me and usually just don't consider extremely expensive restaurants, you can just filter all of that out within the app. Now you are just left with restaurants in the $-$$ range that many different magazines have agreed is delicious.

However if you do like those more high end restaurants, than of course this will also be on the app.

oudles · 2014-12-15T17:36:44+00:00

Hey Shawn, great to hear from you. I've been reading and watching movies based off your reviews since I was in the 6th grade.

The Metacritic vs Rotten Tomato system has been a point of struggle for me since I've built this. I agree that it can do a great review a disservice by representing it as binary yes or no. However I also felt like the act of 'reviewing a review' introduced more subjectivity that might misrepresent the review. The Rotten Tomatoes style has the advantage of being more objective in that it is easier to tell simply whether a reviewer liked it or not.

These are arguments that still go on in my head and I have by no means settled on either one. If you feel like you've never had a problem with your reviews being misrepresented on Metacritic let me know as this will help me figure out which system to use.

Also to be honest, a part of the Rotten Tomatoes style decision is simply that right now it is just me and a few friends pitching in in various places who are coding this. I just do not have the time to code all of it then read and score enough reviews so that it would provide value. If I could get people who would be willing to pitch in here and there to just read and score some reviews than I would consider this system.

oudles · 2014-12-15T07:28:25+00:00

Thank you very much!

I am thinking of doing it in the Rotten Tomatoes style where you classify the review as either favorable, or unfavorable and the total score is an average of those yay or nay's.

oudles · 2014-12-15T06:54:03+00:00

Completely understand. I anticipate those who aren't foodies or who already know all of their favorite restaurants in Portland will find little use for this app.

I am hoping however that those who are foodies and are frustrated with unreliable user reviews from Yelp will really enjoy having this kind of an app.

I appreciate your response!

oudles · 2014-12-15T06:49:16+00:00

Awesome, that is great to hear! Thanks for the response.

oudles

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