So many still ask, what’s the point? I simplified it like they do on the About pages. Instead of reading through reviews looking for the best entire restaurants in your city, this serves up the best dishes. The best of everything in any category. If you want to eat only the best pasta, salad and then a dessert, who says they have to be at the same restaurant?  Foodspotting lets you see the best dish in any given area using your phone GPS.  From there you can search, see what your friends like and more.

Of course, they were smart enough to forge some form of game into the system to help make it addictive.  You can become an expert on specific food groups/types (and be known as an excellent photographer as well) and build Noms on the foods you find that others want or say they like as well.  You can get marks for a great find or great shot.  Commenting and more also appear.

Google Maps is built into their homepage and new finds pop up on the map, even before you log in.  From there you can narrow by location, category and friends.  They added widgets for your blog/website to expand their reach.  The team at Foodspotting even took the next step to integrate Foursquare.  So when you find that dish, go ahead and check in at the same time.

Lists of most active users, top users and more can be easily found.  You can connect to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Instagram to share as well as find friends from those networks.

In essence they have done all the basics right, from the start.  I enjoyed the responsiveness of the team before and during the beta and look forward to what they have in future releases.

Look for the app on iPhone/iPod/iPad and Android.

Let me explain further.  A restaurant sees, sometimes accidentally, that people are checking in (via FourSquare or Brightkite or whatever) to their restaurant.  This then shows to their friends and followers where they are and a place they eat often.  Most restaurants get business from word of mouth, not just random stopping by.  So to have those people continue to patronize the location, they offer coupons for that day via Twitter (see my posting from March 09).

Then along comes services like FourSquare that take location awareness to a game level.  By checking into a place often enough, you can become the mayor of the location.  No matter what it is.  Wayne Sutton became mayor of his hotel room in Vegas at BlogWorldExpo humorously.  So the restaurant rethinks some of the strategy and gives free drinks (or maybe a small dessert or salad, whatever) to the current mayor of the location.  The person is there spending enough money and announcing where they eat, so this becomes a frequent visitor/diner card without the card.

How do you, the user, capitalize?  Look for places that have offerings that you frequently visit.  Point out to the owners of some of these local delis, cafes and more about the ability to maximize patronage without extra advertising budget.  Look at what Rizzo Tees in St Louis does via Twitter to drive traffic.  Chris does an amazing job with offers, coupons and specials and has a large following.

Forgot the crazy thought about having a coupon show up as you walk by a place, most of us already have a destination in mind and there is so much more integration to be done there first with GPS.  This side lets the customer be the word of mouth.