Tag Archives: web 2.0

Untappd

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I’ve been playing a bit with Gowalla and Foursquare, a couple of services that let you use your smartphone to “check in” to the places you go and meet up with your friends. They each, to different degrees, make a game of it. Foursquare gives you points and you can become “Mayor” of places you go to frequently. Gowalla give you pins for places you visit, lets you find and collect objects, and more.

Anyway, it didn’t take long after starting with these that it occurred to me that it would be cooler if I could, instead of places, check in with whatever beer I’m drinking. There are apparently such apps in existence. One such is Beer Garden (iPhone only). Another such is Untappd.

The mechanics to Untappd are similar to other check-in services. You have a “Friends” list where your alerts go to and come from. There’s “The Pub” where you can see a stream of the latest activity. As you check in to different beers you earn badges, such as “Winter Wonderland” (have five different Winter Warmers). There’s “trending beers”, both for micro and macro beers as well as “trending places”.

As with other Social apps, you get out of it what you put in. It’s interesting to see what other people are drinking and what the most popular beers are at a given time. Recently added: Recommendations, based on your favorite styles and what your friends are drinking.

Untappd is a web app, so it will work (they claim) on Android, iPhone, Blackberry, and Palm. (It works fine on my Droid.) Of course, this means you need to have a network connection in order to use it. They also offer connections to auto-post your Untappd status to Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. In an interesting twist, you can not update your beer status more often than fifteen ten minutes. (Update: They’ve changed the cooldown to ten minutes.)

I have only two one significant complaints, and they’re it’s related to their decision to make the app a web-only app. [See below] They don’t allow you to check into beers if you visit untappd.com with your desktop web browser. I spend a lot of time working at my desk and enjoying a beer while I do so (I write a beer blog, after all); I would prefer to not dig out my device just to “check in” to a beer I’m drinking.

(Greg Avola, one of the co-founders of Untappd, informs me that one can indeed check in to a beer from a desktop browser. Wooty-woot!)

My other complaint is with their “report” functionality. You can report a beer or brewery with incorrect information in order to get it fixed. Unfortunately, you can’t do that with a desktop browser either and, at least on my Droid, the drop-down menu to choose the reason for the report just does not function correctly.

Other than that, I’m having a blast sharing my beer choices in the moment. If you’d like to “friend” me in Untappd my username is al-at-hoptalk although you might be better off searching for “Al E”. If you already follow Hop Talk on Twitter (@hoptalk) or Facebook (facebook.com/hoptalk) you should be able to use the import tools Untappd offers to find me. I’d love to see what you’re drinking.

Beer Suggest

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This just may be the site I’ve been looking for.

Netflix has been one of my favorite services for some time. One of my favorite features on their site is their recommendation engine. Based on the ratings I have given movies, and comparing them to the ratings other people have given the same movies, they’re able to make pretty good guesses about other movies that I might like.

I’ve been wishing for the same thing with beer.

Well, Beer Suggest may be the answer.

From the about page:

Beer Suggest is a niche community for beer lovers. The goal of Beer Suggest is to provide the most informative beer site on the net.

The site is currently in open beta. Registered users can:

  • Tag beers, to help describe them beyond their style
  • Rate beers, on a 5-star scale (not unlike our own unofficial rating system)
  • Review beers, focusing on Appearance, Aroma, Mouthfeel, Taste, and Overall Appeal
  • Search for beer and breweries
  • Add and edit beers and breweries
  • Browse a calendar of Beer Events
  • and view lots of different Statistics

I’m off to sign up and check it out. You should too.

(via Lifehacker (via Mashable))

More Beer 2.0

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Ummm…what?

Beer 2.0. You know, Web 2.0 technology focused on beer. We’ve mentioned other beer-focused Web 2.0 sites before.

Well, here’s a few more my fellow technophiles might want to look into.

Blogged – www.blogged.com

Blogged is a directory of, well, blogs. In particular I draw your attention to All > Family & Home > Cooking > Drinks > Alcoholic > Beer. Registered users can review blogs themselves, connect with other members, get notifications if their own blog gets a review, and so on.

The Aleuminati – aleuminati.ning.com
and
Democracy’s Drink – www.democracysdrink.com

Heard of MySpace? Facebook? Same idea here. Members can create profile pages with all kinds of customization, participate in forums, and otherwise network socially. The difference is that these communities focus on beer.

BrewPoll – www.brewpoll.com

Heard of Digg? Again, this is basically the same idea. Members can vote on stories, and the stories with the highest ratings bubble to the top. Again, however, the difference is in the focus: beer-related stories.

Finally, I’ll mention Plusmo. What is Plusmo? I’ll let them explain it:

Plusmo is a FREE service that lets you run cool mobile widgets
on your phone. Mobile widgets are tiny killer apps that offer a
much better mobile experience for a specific purpose. There
are over 20,000 widgets on Plusmo, most of them created and
shared by users like you.

They’re not beer-focused, obviously. However, someone has created a Plusmo widget for Hop Talk.

What are your favorite beery Web 2.0 gizmos?

YourBeers

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I don’t really know what “Web 2.0” is, but I’ll bet this site is part of it.

YourBeers Beer Guide

It is, very simply, a place to rate beers. Anyone can join, add a beer, or three, or a hundred, and rate them. You can also comment on them, post in the forums, and look through the data in any number of ways.

Their “About Us” page says:

Your Beers is a web 2.0 social networking site for beer enthusiasts. It allows individuals to discover new types of beer and to share their favorites with the world.

The site uses AJAX, which all of the cool Web 2.0 apps use nowadays, making using it dead simple. The interface is clean and easy to use.

It looks like it launched in the latter half of 2006 and never really got significant traction. Sadly, it appears to be foundering. The last couple of messages in the forums are spam and messages in all are rather sparse.

Competing against such well-established heavyweights as Beer Advocate and RateBeer probably accounts for much of that. It’s your typical “chicken-and-egg” conundrum. The site won’t be compelling until it has a good database of information. It won’t get that information until people sign up and add it. People won’t sign up for the site until it has a good database of information.

I think it could be worthwhile, though. It’s much simpler than its competition, and isn’t saddled (yet) with the politics and cliques of long-established community members. It also doesn’t try to be anything more than a place for people to rate beers and share. That’s not a knock against them, or anyone else; Sometimes, to me, doing one thing and doing it well is the best way to go.

Update (10-May-2008): The site appears to have been abandoned. There is little more content than when I first posted this, and now the forums are rife with spam. The site has been abandoned by its owners. I can no longer recommend it at all.

Wikipedia for beer

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Love it or hate it, think it’s an ego-stroker for pop-culture geeks or the most democratic application of human knowledge, or something in between, there is no denying the success of Wikipedia. While the problems you would expect from a site that anyone can edit, like vandalism, slander, and complete misinformation are rampant and continually thwarted, it still contains an unbelievable amount of information that is accurate and useful. Between Wikipedia and Google, I feel like there’s nothing that I can’t find the answer to.

Even the reason for this little blog, beer, is well-represented on Wikipedia. Check out the Wikipedia Portal: Beer.

But, as you know, no general knowledge resource can reach the depth of information for a topic as well as a resource focused on just that topic. So, I decided to look around to see if there was a “Wikipedia for Beer”. A “Beer-o-pedia” if you will.

Indeed, there are a number of community-driven open content Wikipedia-like projects out there on the world wide web. In fact, all of the ones I found in a brief search are using the same software as Wikipedia. Unfortunately, for the most part, they are not very well developed, and in at least one case seems to be fairly well abandoned.

Brewerpedia
This was only launched recently, and it shows. They appear to be looking to cover beer, wine, mead, spirits, and soda. Only there are only a handful of pages, and none of them very well developed. Only five registered developers. Unless they start adding content there’s nothing worthwhile.

Beer Wiki at Wikia
Wikia is a commercial concern from Jimbo Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia. The idea is that they offer the Wikipedia software and hosting, limit repeat topics, and make money with ad revenue. Its relationship to Wikimedia should give it a leg up, but it really doesn’t and it shows. The focus is purely beer, but there still aren’t that many pages, but what is a little more developed. There is still less than a dozen registered users.

Beeropedia
Now this is more like it. Lots of articles are still “stubs”, but there are many that are fairly well fleshed out. Some of the information offered for individual beers includes alcohol content, containers, and links to commercials. Still, there’s still not as much information as can be found at Wikipedia. And, again, fewer than a dozen registered users. (Not that this is a real measure of its quality, but a site like this needs to be popular in order to get people to add content, and a popular site should have a lot of registered users.)

Beeripedia – The Beer Wiki
Like Wikia, this resource is ad supported, although apparently not a pet project of a multi-millionaire. More pages are available, although many are still just “stubs”. There are over a hundred registered users, however. Judging by the logs, it is also the most active of all of these. If I were to sign on to help out at any of these, this would be the one.

Still, none of these can match the amount of pure beer information available at Wikipedia. There are certainly a few reasons for this: Wikipedia has been around for several years and has thousands of editors. The style guidelines are well-established, and prolific editors contribute across multiple topics. And, of course, there some very large non-wiki beer community sites with a wealth of information, such as BeerAdvocate.

What’s your favorite beer-focused community site/wiki?

Beer 2.0

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If you pay any attention at all to technology news, one of the big buzzwords right now is Web 2.0. For the uninitiated, Web 2.0 refers to the “next generation” of web services, where content is mostly created by individuals or collaboratively (rather than being created by big companies) and the web experience is more like desktop applications, utilizing technologies like web services, AJAX, and RSS. Blogs and wikis are generally considered to be part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. (For a more detailed description of Web 2.0, see Wikipedia.)

You’re thinking: What does this have to do with me and the pursuit of good beer? I’m glad you asked!

Two interesting sites came to my attention recently. Both would be considered Web 2.0 applications and can help you and I and other thirsty beer seekers out there find good beer.

Beer Mapping Project

The Beer Mapping Project at beermapping.com is a project to help people find good beer using the Google Maps API. While it is U.S. only at the present time, it offers two types of maps: Regional Brewery maps and City maps. The Regional Brewery maps use icons to indicate the locations of breweries and brewpubs in six regions of the country. Everything from each of Anheuser-Busch’s locations down to little brewpubs way out in the hinterlands is listed here. Since it’s Google maps, you can drag the map around, zoom in and out, and get directions.

The other maps are City beer maps, and these are even more ambitious. For a given metropolitan area (and in some cases a State), icons are displayed for breweries, brewpubs, beer bars, and beer stores. I checked out Washington, DC and was shocked to discover how many good beer locations I didn’t know about.

At the time of this writing, Cities currently mapped include:

  • Austin
  • Baltimore
  • Boston
  • Boulder
  • Chicago
  • Cleveland
  • Denver
  • Detroit
  • Los Angeles
  • Madison
  • Milwaukee
  • Minneapolis
  • North Carolina
  • New York City
  • Philadelphia
  • Pittsburgh
  • Portland
  • San Antonio
  • San Diego
  • San Francisco
  • Seattle
  • St. Paul
  • Washington DC

More cities are planned, but geocoding each address takes time. There are also forms to submit a missing location and to correct errors.

Coastr.com – the social guide to beer

Coastr.com is a social networking site centered around beer. Registered users can add beers that they enjoy and write reviews for them and, of course, find other people who like the same beers. Each user gets a rating, which is calculated on how many beers have been reviewed and how many people found the review helpful. Beers can be browsed by style, brewer, tags, and origin. If you really like a particular style or beers from New Jersey, this is helpful.

Additionally, registered users can add “places”. This is a little nebulous, but is supposed to be “establishments where you enjoy your favorite beers, as well as stores where you can purchase those great, hard-to-find brews.” I’d like to be able to categorize places like brewpubs out from other types of locations—I’d drive significantly further for a brewpub than for just a bar or beer store—but no such option exists. I give them credit for keeping things as simple as possible.

There includes a blog with the goings-on of the site, as well as a WordPress widget (which you may very well see here on Hop Talk in the near future). They’re really embracing Web 2.0 and, in fact, received an honorable mention in the social tagging category in the SEOmoz Web 2.0 Awards.