ReadWriteWeb

Back in the salad days of ecommerce, I worked for a website that sold cars. Sounds a little odd but it worked, though not well enough to best its competitors, one of whom absorbed it. As the only marcom guy there, I was approached often for the inevitable side-projects my co-workers were launching. One gentleman was leaving in order to start his own company and wanted to hire me to edit his web copy. To this day, I am proud that I was able to master my expression as I looked over his draft. His company was an online dry-cleaning service. Go ahead and re-read that last sentence. It was the dumbest idea I had ever heard and it remains my hallmark for dumb ideas to this day.

Now we are in a new era, that of the Social Web. But just as we take our positive qualities with us through time - intellect, compassion, inventiveness - we also take our dumbness. Today I came across two ideas - one a process, the other a product - that shot me back in time to the moment I first read about online dry-cleaning. Both, horribly enough, are food-related; and both are profoundly dumb.

Photo by Ed Schipul

If you carry a Web-enabled phone and you like to eat, chances are it's happened to you. You're out. You're hungry. You want to check out a new restaurant nearby, or perhaps you're visiting another city. You pull out your phone to search for a restaurant. Even if you use a fancy, location-based app like Yelp or UrbanSpoon, you still want to see what's on the menu. So you click through to the restaurant's site, and... nothing. Turns out, the restaurant owner paid some kid who knew Flash to built a slick website for them five years ago that has no chance of loading on the BlackBerrys and iPhones of today.

The reviewing site Yelp has partnered with the online reservation site OpenTable. Now you can check out a restaurant review on the former and book it on the latter without leaving the page.

Restaurants, Yelp said on its blog, make up 29% of its reviews. The partnership seems strategically smart.

After eating the best meal of your life, it's hard to forget the experience. It's not unusual for individuals to spend a decade in search of the perfect New York-style pizza in California or the best ramen in London. At this level of obsession, you simply can't be satiated by reading menus or scouring the blurry restaurant pictures and user-generated diatribes of regular review sites. Whether you've got a fixation on fresh lobster ragoût or a hankering for hickory smoked ham, Foodspotting lets hungry users peruse through what can only be described as food porn.

In my last workplace, ordering food for the group was always a dreaded task. Regardless of how much you enjoy the company of your colleagues, there's always someone with a nut allergy, someone who wants their dressing on the side and someone who is quite simply, a pain in the butt. Best known for its web-to-door food delivery service, DiningIn just launched a group ordering feature. Rather than having to painstakingly record your staff's food preferences, users create an Evite-like invitation and give others carte blanche to fuss over their orders.

Leeks, celery, carrots, cannellini beans and some herbs. Epicurious says put all that together and you'll have an excellent vegetarian cassoulet. User comments strongly suggest using vegetable stock instead of water. But what about the wine?

Two year old wine social network Snooth announced today that it is now powering wine recommendations for the 25,000 editor tested recipes on Conde Nast's food site Epicurious. Snooth says this is just the first of a number of big sites that its custom algorithm will power recommendations on. That cassoulet? Snooth suggests you serve a Montevina Terra d'Oro Syrah 2002 ($15) with it. Nice.

Yesterday, on Digg the Blog, Digg founder Kevin Rose announced the next Townhall, scheduled for Monday, May 12th at 8 PM EDT/5 PM PDT. Like the last one (our coverage), this Townhall will also be a virtual meeting held as a live webcast and made available for download afterwards.