Since January 1st, I’ve photographed and cataloged every meal I’ve eaten on a site called What I Ate This Year. I’ve been using Tumblr for the project, but thanks to an article on PSFK I discovered a photoblogging service called Eat.ly designed specifically for people to share their meals.
I gave the service a solid once-over but have decided to stick with Tumblr. While I’m on the topic, though, I figured I could share a little about my thought process and give some suggestions to Eat.ly for future growth.
The basic concept of Eat.ly is very simple: photograph and tag meals, follow friends who do the same, and everyone has the option to rate your meals on a scale of how healthy or unhealthy the meal looks. Eat.ly is, in its own words, “encouraging healthier and more social eating.” This is a lofty and admirable goal, and eat.ly does manage to attract more social eating.
Eat.ly’s main goal of healthy eating is what could limit its appeal. I think that forcing users to rate food items on a scale of unhealthy to healthy could breed a sort of uni-dimensional user base where the only people who visit the site are health junkies. As the site works right now, people who play by the rules should rate a photograph of a delicious but calorie-ridden meal as an unhealthy meal. That’s fair, but what if this meal is one of the best meals I’ve had in recent memory? Shouldn’t I be rewarded for having a good meal, not punished?
An aside: Tumblr’s functionality isn’t much better – you can either “like” a post or ignore it (just like Facebook, there is no “unlike” feature). But Tumblr is much more of an open canvas platform.
I would encourage Eat.ly to adopt either a 5 star rating scale or a Like-Unlike scale. Both of these are easily understood and can translate well to members of different communities. If I’m a (mostly) vegetarian, my friends can ‘unlike’ my photos when I give in to pressure and order the steak and ‘like’ when I show a healthy meal of grains and veggies. If I’m a foodie, my friends can ‘unlike’ boring shots of ham sandwiches and ‘like’ shots of something adventurous at the ethnic restaurant down the street. With a rating system that is not limited to unhealthy/healthy, Eat.ly lets users define their own limits. It says to them: “You and your friends are unique. You have your own methods of eating, and they may be different than other users on the site.” Eat.ly should facilitate the open rating of meals by friends, it should not judge users based on the perceived health quality of their meal.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Scott,
Thanks for the thoughtful post, and for giving Eat.ly a solid try! When we launched Eat.ly we wanted a simple, yet low friction way for people to participate. We decided on a very subjective approach with the score, using 0-100 as our scale. We are very open to what the platform may become and appreciate this type of open dialogue. Nothing is set in stone.
I actually agree with you that the health score does influence behavior and may even keep people from using the site in a certain way. We felt that we needed some kind of simple tracking that was not calorie or carbohydrate related, and was easy.
We may not have figured out the best approach and you brought up a great point about the enjoyment factor of a meal. I know that a cheeseburger and fries may not be the healthiest meal, but I sure loved it
You may have noticed the small heart icon that is now below each meal post – this will soon be a way to “like” or by virtue of not clicking, imply that you don’t like a meal. We hope this adds some depth to those people that are not even using the scoring system in the first place.
In closing, we really wanted to get something usable online, and iterate in real time. This is exactly the type of feedback we wanted to get to help influence the platform and I welcome a continued dialogue if you are up for it! (my email should be in the comments)
Hey Eric,
Thanks for responding to my post!
One issue I’ve ran into while photographing my meals is how to make them look appetizing, healthy, filling, or any other adjective you can dream of. And I’m not talking about photography – I mean if a meal was the healthiest meal I’ve had all year, how can I illustrate it like that? How can I differentiate it, absent some sort of rating system that would be completely arbitrary?
Eat.ly has to have a system. There would be no way to filter through all the meals without some sort of metric. The health factor is one of many. But a meal can be healthy and look terrible, or it can look great and be unhealthy. That’s why I really like that you have decided to add the heart icon while keeping the health slider. By doing so I think the ratings now function more as plots on a grid, with health on one side and enjoyment on the other. I can’t really think up an easier way to do it than to do that.
Hey Scott,
Thanks for your post on our blog. Also, never heard of Eat.ly until now.
It’s strange, because I know a lot of people, including myself, that love photographing our food. I can definitely see the potential here. Have either of you guys heard of the Facebook diet? People post up what they ate, along with a photo, daily, so friends can track their eating habits and add words of encouragement.
In any case, our NYC office has a TON of great places to eat around us. I would love to have an Eat.ly app for iPhone. Anything in the works?
Scott and Eric, you should be fans with us on Facebook, we’ll return the favor!
http://www.facebook.com/creativefeed
Eric,
Saw the promotional video…great job! Love the fact that you can e-mail the pics, so I just wanted to correct myself before.
Follow us on facebook.com/creativefeed so we can support you back. Does Eat.ly have a page?
I’ve never heard of the Facebook Diet, but I suppose it’s a little like what I am trying to do. Except that I use Tumblr and don’t have a clear goal (like losing weight). My goal is more the documentation of the meals and then the analysis afterward.
I do have to wonder about over-sharing though, especially on Facebook. I’m careful not to go overboard with photos of any kind on Facebook, so I can’t fathom sharing all of my food photos there. In fact, when I made my food blog I toyed with the idea of linking my Tumblr account with my Twitter account and tweeting every photo. I decided instead to give What I Ate This Year its own Twitter account. While I could be broadcasting my meals to a much higher number of people with my personal Twitter account, it would register as spam to them. As it is now, I have an okay number of people following on Twitter and quite a few more on Tumblr. These are the people who are choosing to look at photos of what I’m eating, and in the case of the people on Tumblr, most of them have never even met me before.
Love eat.ly too but have you also heard of foodspotting.com? Also a pretty cool website that lets you upload photos and link them to a particular restaurant and/or type of food.