Interview with Kristopher of Group Recipes
Group Recipes is a social network with a delicious slant. Their central focus is obviously food, and the social aspects created around such a topic are suprisingly refreshing. Group Recipes isn't just a place to share your recipes and find new ones, but it incorporates a hefty amount of tools that help you discover more about yourself and connect well with others, including a stumble feature that will randomly choose a recipe for you, and a detailed floating sidebar showing your activity history. You can subscribe to a particular user who's recipes you like, add a recipe to a comparison chart, or send it to your cell phone.
I like their recipie robot best--it's designed to consider your food preferences and reccomend recipes accordingly. And they do encourage users to upload videos of their own little cooking shows (some of which are pleasantly professional). My favorite is Boy Eats World's episode explaining how to make a watermellon martini from real watermellon (a recipe I've been searching for these past few months). Even if you're a bad cook, you'd still get a good deal of foodie benefits from perusing Group Recipes.
Below is an interview with Kristopher of Group Recipes.
How did you decide to create a social network around food?
It sounds terribly trite, but basically I looked at food websites and thought I could do it better (Wow, that sounds pompous to boot). These massive sites hadn't changed in years. Nobody was focusing on community, let alone harnessing it to make the user experience better and more efficient. So I studied the vertical for awhile and thought I had enough unique ideas to make a go of it.
You've got tons of features on your site to keep users involved. Where did you get some of your inspiration from?
The site doesn't have any specific inspirations, but utilizes a lot of what has been shown to work for social sites in general.
Tell me a bit about the Recipe Robot...
Much of the site's development focused on creating an algo to analyze both user histories semantically and probabilistically (with regression analysis). Roger the Recipe Robot is the pretty wrapper we place on the guts of the algo that predicts recipes for you.
What's the most important aspect of Group Recipes?Harnessing community to find good food. GR is about more than networking, it is leveraging the collective knowledge (and data) to make finding good food more fun and more efficient.
Do you have any added features, such as widgets?Yeah, brand us "Web 2.0", we do indeed have widgets.
What are some features you plan on adding soon?We have a few more rounds of fine tuning, then we are going to push out some more "exploration" focused features.
Would you consider any sort of partnerships with other companies, such as a larger social network or a food publication?
I don't see any value working with a generic social network; however, I do indeed see some value in working with some of the larger established food/recipe companies. We are exploring a lot of options right now.
What are the next steps for Group Recipes?Growth. That is chief focus at this stage. Like every social network, we are chasing "the tipping point".
