Food Recommendation App Mines Weibo Data For Restaurant Tips

Where to eat? What to eat? These are the two questions that I ask myself every day. Most of the time, many of us run out of ideas about what to eat for our meals.

HaoYouMeiShi (“mei shi” means “good food” in Chinese) is a Beijing-based startup that aspires to serve up fresh dining recommendations. Unlike some traditional food recommendation services that are already on the market, HYMS is making good use of China’s largest micro-blogging site, Sina Weibo, to deliver better recommendations for users.

And so HaoYouMeiShi (HYMS) collates users’ dining experience on Weibo through data mining and restructures the results into a list of recommendations. Weibo, of course, has many users sharing their dining experience and choice of restaurants. The ranking of the restaurants and meals is also determined by the users’ sentiments and comments on the microblog.

I gave the app a test run, and it’s pretty easy to navigate. But most importantly, the quality of the restaurants looks good. I suppose this is because the pool of Weibo users from which it is generating those recommendations is really huge, thanks to its 300+ million registered users.

This is another example of social media bringing a new dimension to the online to offline (O2O) market as we continue to see startups engaging this concept.

Currently there are quite a few renowned food-recommendation services in this market like Shi Shen Yao Yao or Dianping. Or you could use some fun foodie app like Burpple and look at the user-submitted photos. It will be interesting to see how HYMS will compete against the big players with its Weibo data crawling algorithm. The app was launched one week ago and it’s available for download on iOS.