Nosh, a mobile app for iOS and Android that lets you post and read reviews and photos of individual dishes on the menus of restaurants, has released an updated version of its app that supports sharing photos of food with friends in private locations – like the food you cook at home. Craig Walker, CEO of the company that built Nosh (Firespotter Labs), previously co-founded the companies that became Yahoo Voice (Dialpad) and then Google Voice (GrandCentral). Walker says that private locations were among the top user requests when the app launched six weeks ago.
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.
Today’s updates to Nosh also included posting to Foursquare, more granular filters in search and the ability to post longer reviews and higher-quality photos through the Nosh website – you’re no longer limited to posting from a phone.
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.
