Blurp

Restaurant, Pub, and Cafe reviews you can trust, from your Facebook friends and friends-of-friends.

Blurp is a Facebook application now available on the iPhone and iPod touch. When you are on the go the app shows recommended restaurants near you. Looking for a new place to have a meal or grab a pint? See what your friends have been up to by checking out their Recently Reviewed restaurants. Had a particularly good meal (or a bad one for that matter), add a review to Blurp and let your friends know about it!

The project was born out of a frustration with astroturfed reviews ( fake reviews by the company itself ) on review sites, and also wandering around London hungry and wishing I had a friends recommendation for something they liked nearby.

As if right now there are a limited number of reviews, so if you are the first of your friends to use Blurp you may not see any reviews ( London and Vancouver have the most right now ). If you try out the app I would love it if you added one or two of your favourite restaurant, pub or cafes into the system (and if you let your friends see the review by publishing it to your facebook stream maybe they will try it too! ). Thanks!

How Blurp works:

The application really requires a Facebook account ( you can still try it out without one, but you cant see any reviews as they are all from friends or friends friends ). In the Profile or Friends tab tap the "Connect with Facebook" button. A Facebook dialog box will popup and ask you to add the application.

The Blurps tab is where you will likely spend most of your time. This will be showing a map of the world initially and then after that always show where you were looking last. You can move the map using swipes and pinches like the Maps application, or click the target icon in the top left to center the map on your current location.

Once the map is where you want to look for restaurants, cafes or pubs tap the search button on the top left of the screen. This will drop pins on the map, red ones for businesses with reviews from your friends, purple ones for businesses that do not have a review by one of your friends ( they still can have friend-of-friend reviews though). Tap a pin to see the reviews.

To add a review search the map over the restaurant. Selecting the restaurants pin shows the details and an Add Review button on the top left of the screen will let you add your own review. If the restaurant is not yet in Blurp you can add it using the + button next to the location button on the top left. This will let you Google the restaurant and add it into Blurp.

The Friends tab shows a list of all your facebook friends using the application. Hopefully this list will grow over time, if people find the app useful. Tap a friend to see their reviews and favorites.

Lastly the Profile tab shows your reviews and favorites. Please post feedback on the Facebook applications about page, so we can figure out what features to add, and what to fix up! http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=51718348562