NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
End of an era: Urbanspoon closed following Zomato acquisition
Zomato Media Ptv Ltd has closed iconic restaurant reviews site Urbanspoon following their acquisition of the site from IAC/InterActive Corp. in January.
Urbanspoon was nine years old at the time of closure and was among the early wave of what was then called Web 2.0 startups that embraced user submitted content.
The site had offered restaurant search, reviews and ratings with a strong presence in the United States, Canada, U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.
According to a blog post from Zomato the data from Urbanspoon has been included in their listings, with some changes including a change to a star rating system, and a forced limit of one review per user (Urbanspoon supported multiple reviews.)
Wishlists and favorites have been imported to Zomato as bookmarks, which can found via a profile page, and bookmarks can now be filtered by city.
For those who previously used Urbanspoon for reviews without having signed up to the service, Zomato, bizarrely, forces people to log in, at least to use the app; their justification is that it is so they can “personalize and customize the product experience.”
One thing that will be missed, as pointed out by Geekwire, is that the Zomato app doesn’t support “shake-to-search,” a fondly used part of the Urban Spoon app that allows a user to shake their phone to have a nearby eating establishment appear on the screen.
“Adding to all the existing locations on Urbanspoon, you can now explore restaurants in 22 countries (and counting) globally” they company says in pushing its product. “There are over 1 million restaurants to choose from in 10,000+ cities, so the Zomato app is a trusted companion to take with you on holiday.”
It may have not, at its closure, been the best online service for restaurant reviews, and indeed the user interface hadn’t really changed much at all over the years, but that was part of the charm of the Urbanspoon experience; that, and it just had a really, really good archive of reviews and details such as prices.
That data is still there today, in the form of Zomato, but a shiny, flash startup just won’t be the same for many old time Urbanspoon users.
Image credit: achimh/Flickr/CC by 2.0
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