By: Co-Editor, Bobby B:

As Americans continue to refine their palates, the Internet has provided a haven for foodies. The Food Network website is one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Internet. Other sites like Gourmet.com and Epicurious.com are among the most popular sites of any kind. Moreover, foods once considered exotic or strange, such as sushi, are now ubiquitous.

This heightened interest in food has made the act of going out to eat an important part of many people’s lifestyle. Discussing and rating restaurants on the Internet has become a hobby for some and a living for others. With the rise of Twitter, more and more people are commenting on their latest food adventures.

Now comes iAte.com to help organize what all these folks are tweeting about. iAte pulls restaurant reviews and food talk from Twitter. When a Twitter user sends a tweet mentioning a restaurant, iAte imports the tweet, identifies the actual restaurant mentioned, and makes the conversation brow-sable and search-able by restaurant. Behind the scenes a natural language processing system analyzes every tweet mentioning food from any user on Twitter. The system attempts to determine whether a restaurant is mentioned in the tweet, and finds the specific restaurant that was mentioned. By matching a tweet with a restaurant, iAte makes it easy to see all the tweets that are about a specific restaurant.

Twitter users can also tell iAte to import a tweet to their iAte profile by mentioning @iAte in their tweet. Even if iAte can not identify the restaurant, the tweet will automatically be added to the users eating history. If the restaurant is not automatically matched, the user also has the ability to manually match the tweet to a restaurant

Visitors to iAte.com can see trending restaurants for their area, search reviews, view their eating history, and see the most popular restaurants of their friends and followers.
Read more