Restaurant discovery service, Zomato, recently announced the roll-out of its revamped web and mobile platforms, adding a social layer to the food directory. This new feature will help people who are scouting the web for munchies to search for hotspots based on friends’ recommendations.
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The social integration to discovering food, or anything else really, is becoming more and more prominent in personalising the whole online experience. Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO of Zomato, notes:
“Even before the advent of the internet, people relied on social opinions for restaurant discovery. In our endless discussions with our users, we realized this behavior is still widely prevalent, but not catered to effectively by existing local discovery tools or review websites. With our new product, we want to cater to that intrinsic behavior in an amplified, social setting.”
Among the new features is a FoodFeed that lets users see updates and activities from their network on Zomato, as well as restaurants visited, rated and reviewed — encouraging a more social, real-time discovery of restaurants.
The platform, which now requires a user login, has been updated so that your search results are more relevant to you personally or socially. For instance, you can choose to follow other trusted foodies and search for restaurants based on their tastes.
Apart from the social aspect to it all, the overall user experience has been revamped and now lets its 16 million monthly visits search and discover restaurants with fewer clicks. Enhanced spam-control measures have been implemented to keep out junk reviews.
The startup launched in Delhi, India in 2008 and today serves information of over 221 000 restaurants across 12 countries and 41 cities.
“This is the biggest leap we’ve taken, and that’s meant effectively rebuilding Zomato from scratch in a lot of respects. A lot of effort has gone into creating the new Zomato, and we’re very excited with the way it looks and works; we hope our users love it as much as we do,” Deepinder added.
