Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Do We Really Need Another One?

With the temporary shutdown of Tastespotting, 3 sites quickly filled the gap - Food Gawker, Food Porn Daily, and Recipe Muncher.

I personally prefer Food Porn Daily, because of Rachel's commentary.

Food Gawker is good, close to the old Tastespotting.

Recipe Muncher has some RSS feed problems, e.g. I got "New York Style Cheesecake - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" in my reader 27 times in 24 hours. Also, sometimes there are coding problems and you don't see the pic, just a bunch of HTML in your reader, and a 404 when you click thru, e.g. Singapore Style Mee Siam from this morning.

But now there's another one, Photograzing, run by Serious Eats.

And, as you probably know, Tastespotting is back.

I'm thoroughly overloaded. My reader now has 149 unread entries from FG, FPD, RM and TS, accumulated over only 18 hours.

Will I subscribe to Photograzing too? Probably not...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not surprised that Serious Eats launched Photograzing, but I'm baffled why they waited so long given their resources. Just imagine what we could do at foodgawker given their resources!

Vicki said...

Hi Chuck!
Yeah, you would've thought they would've jumped on it right when Tastespotting went down. And personally (not sucking up or anything), I like FG better - FG doesn't have annoying ads masquerading as photos, and has captions to better describe the photos. Plus, I like 40 pics per page rather than 14. Yours looks more professional, PG looks more cheezily marketing-driven.

Vicki said...

Hi Ben!
Maybe you're right, survival of the fittest for the technological age!

Wandering Chopsticks said...

I wonder if we'll ever know what really happened? I find it interesting though that Jean endorsed FoodGawker instead of TasteSpotting. It couldn't have been a simple handover of ownership or else TS wouldn't have been down for two weeks. Bad handling of the whole situation because that just left the field open for all the copycats. Whereas before TS was clearly the central repository. Now everyone is jockeying for position. They lost their momentum. Wonder if they'll get it back?

Vicki said...

Hi WC -
Like Ben said, the best will remain. I can see Photograzing being around for a long time, but no one really paying attention. Recipe Muncher could be good if they fixed their HTML problems. Food Porn Daily is still my favorite, but for volume sites, Gawker is great. Tastespotting lost something during their translation to new owners...

Wandering Chopsticks said...

That's the thing though. Technically, TasteSpotting doesn't have a completely brand new owner. Sarah created it with Jean and co-owned it. It was co-owned and hosted by NotCot. Now it's solely owned by Sarah. The handover was Sarah buying out Jean's half. So it can't have been an amicable split or else Jean would still at least endorse it right? So far, neither of them have said outright exactly what happened. I think that's a misstep. All this speculation, misinformation going around. It's bad PR. They should just release a statement to answer people's questions. Also, in the wake of their absence, bloggers mentioned how they didn't like that other people submitted their stuff, especially that annoying Gingerbreadgirl. And guess what? She's still back to posting. And even Sarah submits pictures from blogs that clearly say they don't allow anyone to use their images. So I stopped submitting to TasteSpotting because clearly they're not addressing people's concerns. And because there are other choices now, my vote's with Chuck and FoodGawker.