Today we had take out food. I had chicken lo mein (a shift from my usual sweet and sour chicken) and a spring roll. I ordered it via home delivery and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I don’t enjoy cooking, nor collecting recipes, but I do enjoy eating and looking at pictures of food. It would have been nice to be able to look up the restaurant to see what other dish I’d like to have. Here is where the social network dedicated to food comes in. Introducing Foodie.

Foodie, brought to us by Glam Media, is still in beta mode, but this is a great opportunity for up and coming chefs, food/foodie bloggers, and authors. There is room for recipes and plenty of engagement, just make sure the content has crisp photos that make us all want to reach out and eat directly from our screens.

Just as in many other social networks you join at no cost and post your profile picture with your information linked to your website or blog. You can simply Follow people that you find interesting and want to keep up to date. What your followers post and comment on shows up in the feed of your Home selection.

Do you or someone you know make a hot sauce, decorate and bake cakes and sweets, or has some other food item? Betty Crocker has already jumped in with recipes which is a great clue to what other businesses can take advantage of by posting recipes which include your very own product(s).

Still, for the person looking for food inspiration this is a great place to get it and to reach out to those whom have written the recipe. Wouldn’t it be great to know of some alternative ingredients and ask the recipe author himself? Again, this is a great place to engage for both the authors/chef/restaurant and for the regular cook in all of us.

Still to come:

Dining Guide – highlighting where to eat. This will be great if it can be area specific. I am not going to be too thrilled to only see Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant and I don’t live anywhere near him. On the other hand, this would be great for the Celebrity Chef tv show to highlight the chefs that try out and where we could all visit them in their restaurants. This could further our experience with the chefs and building the audience’s connection with them as an invitation to their environment.

Chef – The title states it will be the “most distinguished chefs” and “exclusive recipes”. Again, I hope that this will be area specific as chefs could spin from here to have intimate dinners locally and made by them; a great marketing tool for chefs to use to draw a nice tantalizing food event.

Menus – Check out the best menus to sample. (I see graphic designers being able to really shine here for the restaurants who have put a lot of thought in to how their menus are presented.) But what a way to make sure you want to stop by that new place for lunch or on the weekend.

There are other areas such as Healthy, Quick & Easy, Kids Menu, etc. as well as a Forum. In my opinion, I would cut the Forum portion and focus more on registrants to the site engaging via the updates instead of dividing the attention to somewhere else to post.

Don’t Leave Yet

Have you tried Foodie? What are your thoughts? What do you think about this post? Do you know of another social network worth reviewing? Have I convinced you yet that there’s more to life than Twitter marketing? Leave a comment.