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There are hundreds of local recommendation apps for iPhone that aim to help you find quality food and drink at venues near you.
2011-11-13
These apps let you rank places and then comment on menu items.
Oink, on the other hand, lets you rank anything, from a hamburger, to a video game, to just a cup of coffee.
Oink was built by an incubator called Milk founded by Kevin Rose, TechTV personality and founder of Digg.
Check out our walkthrough of Oink, and then grab the free app from the App Store.
Oink is a new app for rating everything, from video games to venti chai tea lattes.
The app is feed-based, like many social apps, but the real power here is in searching for things near you based on tags.
The app is also for Oinking, or posting mini-reviews and pictures of things you're eating and doing.
Oink suggests people to follow that you're already friends with on Facebook and Twitter.
Hungry or bored? Tap "all items" to see the highest-rated food, drink, and entertainment near you.
If you tap "Map" inside the Discover tab, you can see a visual representation of all the best stuff near you.
In the mood for something specific? Type in a tag like "cheap" or "burger" to get instant location-based recommendations
The "Live" tab inside the Discover area populates a live feed of what people are Oinking.
Every item on Oink is ranked within the place that serves it, as well as within the tag it's associated with. This part is very unique.
If you've had this cookie before, you can give it a quick thumbs up or thumbs down, or you can talk about it with other users.
Oink, like the new Foursquare app, let you bookmark "To Do's" for later.
Scenario: you're somewhere and you want to review something. Type in the name of the restaurant, bar, or cafe you're at.
Oink hopes that eventually, most menu items will get added for any given restaurant. It's all crowd-sourced.
No need to type in exactly what you got. The point is, how good was your salad, and what other tags can you attach to make this item better for indexing?
Oink includes some cool Instagram-esque filters to make your meal look extra tantalizing.
Enter in a comment about what you just ate, and then tweet/Facebook/Foursquare it.
The image pops into your profile feed with your thumbs-up rating. Now, your followers, or anyone looking for "salad" and "cheap" will see it.
Lastly, here's a user profile. There are links to items that person has Oinked, as well as that person's "credibility" for certain tags.
Ellis Hamburger is a former reporter for SAI:Tools at Business Insider. He wrote about Facebook, apps, and gadgets.He graduated from the University of Michigan in 2010, where he founded Michigan's first technology blog.
