Twizoo is currently only live in London and San Francisco, but it will be rolling out to more cities in the coming few months. There are plenty of ways to get restaurant recommendations online, with Yelp and Foursquare being two of the best. A little known iOS and Android app out of London is looking to challenge the incumbents by mining Twitter data for information on the best places to eat, and it works really well. It’s a mobile app called “Twizoo.”
It helps you find bars and restaurants based on how good they are, how close they are to you, and how expensive the prices are. It’s great for finding places quickly in neighbourhoods you don’t know very well. (To pronounce it, think Twitter + Review + Zoo).
The most interesting thing about Twizoo is its incredibly clever – and incredibly simple – business model: Because it uses Twitter’s data rather than its own user-data, it doesn’t need a massive number of users to work perfectly. Twizoo works just as well when there is only one active user on the system as it does when there are 100 million.
Yelp, Google+ Reviews and Tripadvisor need millions of users to continuously update the sites with their own reviews. But not Twizoo. “We’ve found on average there are seven customer ‘review’ Tweets about a restaurant for every one TripAdvisor or Yelp review,” says CEO Madeline Parra, “so what we’ve done is create an intelligent layer and algorithms on top of Twitter that makes sense of all this- and recommends to users the best places to eat or drink in real-time.”
Twizoo how it works:
Twizoo taps into the Twitter API and sifts the data coming from the hundreds of millions of tweets created by Twitter’s 281 million monthly active users. As people tweet about various bars and restaurants, it sorts those tweets by geography, by time, and by whether they are positive or negative. When users open Twizoo on their phones, they can easily see which venues are getting lots of good tweets, which ones are not, and how close they are.
Once you’ve picked a venue, the app uses Google Maps to guide you to nearby hotspots, and it ranks them by price, too. The fact that Twitter just partnered with Foursquare to improve Twitter’s location targeting is likely to help Twizoo get better at this also.
