hngry, one of the latest additions to the Web 2.0 gamut, aims to solve the age old riddle that beguiles many of us every night–What should I eat? Basically, you sign up and add your favorite restaurants to the database, and, when you need to decide on what to eat, you enter in criteria about your budget for the night and your preferences, and hngry will suggest a restaurant from your list that is the best match.
My friends and I have long talked about such a magical restaurant decision program. Heck, we’ve sometimes been so indecisive that we use the roll of a dice to determine our final gustatory destination. Despite this, hngry does have areas which need improvement.
First, it’s extremely tedious to enter in restaurant information. The hallmark of such a decision system would be to have accurate and complete information about the restaurants. hngry provides many data fields, including opening and closing times, favorite meals, phone numbers, and price ranges. The problem is, none of this is done automatically–you must look up all the information and type it in by hand. A better solution is for hngry to parse through online directories and automatically retrieve the requesite information when a user selects a restaurant. And better yet, the interaction between users’ databases would be able to provide even better suggestions through network effects.
The second problem is deeper, and the fate of hngry will depend on it. It’s a nice thought that an online database could pluck a restaurant suggestion for me, thereby relieving me of the stress. But, will I actually like the suggestions? Probably not. And that’s when I’ll just hit the suggest button again, hoping for a restaurant ephiphany which will seldom happen. The best that I would hope for is to reveal a restaurant which I had totally forgotten was on my list. Given the current input process, my personal utility from such an application is quite low.
The idea behind hngry is good one. But, it’s going to take some hard work to transform it to a more automated system, which will be essential.