Food nerds are often even more proud of the food they make at home than what they find around town to eat - but most food photo and review services don't support home cooked food posted without a publicly visible location. Now Nosh users looking for nearby food won't see the enchiladas that came out of your oven and come knock on your door - but your friends on the network will see them in their stream of updates from contacts.

The home food photos is particularly exciting though. Almost every social network on earth could use an improved understanding of the difference between home and other locations. Failure to respect location privacy at home can spoil a person's willingness to expose location data anywhere else, too. Flickr came up with a very interesting way to handle that division last week.

Aren't there already a lot of food photo apps in the world, I asked Craig Walker? Why start another one? Walker said that Nosh's approach is different, but that this is also just how startups work.

"GrandCentral was the 15th solution like it and everybody asked why we'd be successful when previous efforts weren't - but we were," he said. "If it's a good idea there will always be more than one person working on it. I've never been too worried about that."

The home photos and the web posting both indicate to me that there are likely plenty of different ways that apps in this space could continue to innovate through competition. That sounds like good news for all of us who love to use our mobile devices to more intelligently engage with the offline world and its food.

UrbanSpoon will charge its customers a subscription fee of $99 per month and a $1 fee for every reservation that is made through its system (reservations through UrbanSpoon's widget will be free).

The application will store its data on UrbanSpoon's servers. Besides allowing restaurants to manage their reservations, the service will also include a customer relationship management database.

Manage Your Restaurant with the iPad

As Lowry told us, the iPad is an ideal device in the restaurant context, as it gives the host far more mobility than the regular large terminal that you can find in most restaurants today. Besides that, Lowry noted, the iPad is also very "cool and sexy," something that a lot of restaurateurs appreciate.

With this move, UrbanSpoon is clearly invading OpenTable's territory. According to Lowry, restaurateurs never really had an alternative to OpenTable until now. With over 8 million users, UrbanSpoon's iPhone app is already one of the most popular restaurant-related mobile apps and given that the company offers a cheaper subscription price and runs on relatively cheap hardware, the company, which has been working on this service ever since Apple announced the iPad, has a chance to make a dent in OpenTable's market.

Urbanspoon Has the User Base to Pull This Off

Urbanspoon's iPhone app has been incredibly successful and is currently getting over 1 million 'shakes' a day. The app and website started out with only a small set of features. Over the last few months, the company has continued to add features and, at this point, Urbanspoon can easily rival most of its larger competitors in this space.

With only four restaurants in one city, Urbanspoon is clearly still taking baby steps. As the OpenTable IPO has shown, however, this is a highly lucrative market. Urbanspoon already has a large user base, and whoever is using the service (and especially the mobile app) is obviously looking to go to a restaurant already. By adding a reservation system, Urbanspoon can offer its users a full range of services, from finding restaurants and checking menus and reviews, all the way to actually making the reservation.

For more info about Urbanspoon's new reservation system, check out Rebekah Denn's post at Eat All About It, which we found via the New York Times Bits blog Twitter feed.

SHARED TRAVEL PLANNING: Both Tripit and Dopplr are fantastic tools for keeping track of itineraries and sharing travel plans with friends. Meanwhile Gliider is a great tool for saving large blocks of trip-related text and syncing them to offline folders.

gliider from jared richardson on Vimeo.

DIRECTIONS: TeleNav provides GPS services for a number of mobile devices including the iPhone. The tool offers voice driving directions, spoken address recognition, rerouting for accidents and traffic jams, and locates wireless hotspots, the lowest gas prices, parking lots and ATMs. TomTom for iPhone is also expected to be a great tool as the docking station doubles as a charger.

FOOD: Many of us are familiar finding food with the Yelp and Urbanspoon iPhone apps; however, if you want an authentic road trip experience you might want to consult Roadfood. This site lays claim to the "most memorable local eateries along the highways and back roads of America." We get heart palpitations just looking at the heaping plates of pulled pork, burgers and ribs. Meanwhile, if you're looking to picnic with something more healthy and sustainable, Local Harvest's farmer's market finder coupled with the Locavore iPhone app offer users the chance to find local in-season produce. Locallectual offers a similar tool with their iLocavore app.

VIDEOS & PHOTOS: One way to get images up quickly is to stream them directly from your camera. Eye-Fi uses a wireless connection to upload photos and videos directly to your Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Picassa accounts. If you want to live stream sans touch ups or editing, Eye-Fi is an extremely useful cordless solution. Other mobile streaming video and image options include Qik, Flixwagon, Stickam, Justin.tv and Kyte Producer.

GEO-TAGGING: AroundShare is a mobile application that allows users to publish photos to Google Maps. Meanwhile, Flickr's users can also organize their videos and photos on a map via the site's geo-tagging features. As for geo-based discovery, Flickr mobile utilizes the locational features of the Android and iPhone and allows members to explore public photos from nearby sites.

TRACKING:Google Latitude lets users share their location on a map in real time from their phones or computers. Maps can be embedded in public websites and road trippers appear as moving dots on the map. Imagine your best friend surprising you with Thai food just as you pull up to your hotel. Services like Brightkite and Loopt also broadcast your location; however, these services are based on push notifications rather than real time tracking.

TELLING THE STORY: The Whuffaoke group is using Dipity to aggregate their media. The service allows users to upload their Tweets, blog posts and photo sets to a map, time line and flip book interface. The nice thing about this tool is that it can either be embedded (as seen here) or shared via Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit or Digg. Other tools to aggregate road trip-related media include JS-Kit's Echo, Disqus or an embedded hashtag feed.