Urbanspoon

Alright, time for a quick sidebar.

I freaking love Urbanspoon. It's marginally related to this blog, because it's how I find a lot of the new (to me) restaurants that I visit. For example, I use the spinny iPhone app frequently, in Cincinnati and otherwise. It has definitely helped out in those "uggggh, where you want to eeeeat" moments. And the website itself is a similar boon-- it helps me manage the restaurants I still want to visit as well as discover others.

But can I talk about the newsletter for a moment? I tend to despise online newsletters. They tend to be worthless, and chock full of a mass message that rarely applies to me. The Urbanspoon newsletter, on the other hand, is a thing of beauty.

As you can see at left, the information in the newsletter is dynamic. It pulls information from my friends and from my city. I love statements such as, "Julie likes Comet, Dixie Chili and 3 others and doesn't like Molly Malone's of Covington." How simple!

This is exactly what a newsletter ought to be: a digest of information that I might have missed and that is uniquely tailored to me.

Consider the "Talk of the Town" section. "Here are restaurants that Cincinnati critics and bloggers are talking about right now." Beautiful! I've added a slew of restaurants to my wishlist through this feature. It's uncomplicated.

One of my favorite newsletter bits didn't make it into my pictures, but it asks if there are any restaurants I can check off of my wishlist, and it's followed by a couple of the spots I've told Urbanspoon I'd like to visit. Wonderful. I gave the site that information, and they use it in a helpful, clever and unobtrusive way.

Sorry to wax poetic! I work in web stuff, am up to my elbows in the stuff day in and day out. So many sites over-complicate everything and I've certainly never found a newsletter-- the junk mail of the internet-- that I've looked forward to browsing through before.

Pair that up with the robust site, the innovative and fun mobile app, and a staff that actually responds to email* (AND the fact that I never had to create an account because they use Facebook Connect) and you'll see why I had to take a moment to sing their praises.

*I wanted to create an Urbanspoon entry for the Cafe de Wheels truck, but you're required to supply an address. The staff helped me label it as "mobile," which is the whole point!