Alfred App Finds Restaurants You'll Love

I'm addicted to "discovery apps" -- software that learns what you love, then recommends new options based on your preferences.

So I was delighted to come across Alfred, an app from CleverSense. Alfred learns about the restaurants you like in your neighborhood: where you like to go for breakfast, for brunch, for lunch, for dinner, for coffee and dessert. Then, based on those preferences, Alfred recommends nearby restaurants wherever you are: at home or on the road.

Especially when traveling, I use UrbanSpoon and TripAdvisor to discover great restaurants all the time. But both neither UrbanSpoon nor TripAdvisor actually make recommendations based on *my* preferences; instead, they rank eateries based on the preferences of everyone who bothers to vote.

And while the wisdom of The Crowd can be useful -- especially if you have nothing else to go on -- it can also be flawed. In the suburbs, for example, The Crowd is apt to rank McDonald's as a great diner or Pizza Hut as fine Italian restaurant. And that's ultimately the problem with ranking apps: systems that average together the votes of average diners tend to point to average results.

Alfred is different, in that his recommendations are, at least in theory, based on your preferences -- the specific experiences you *personally* enjoy. I spent a little time training him (telling him about restaurants we go to on a regular basis), and in minutes, Alfred was recommending places within a mile or two of our house I'd either forgotten about (Tin Lizzy), avoided (Mojito), or never even heard of (Cafe 640?!?).

It's easy to get excited about recommendations before they're road-tested, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to depend on Alfred to answer "What's for dinner?" If you do the same, let me know how things go.

SpotWorld Trip Planner Not Quite Spot-On

SpotWorld, an app exclusively for the iPhone, promises to help curious travelers discover and share great itineraries for their chosen destinations.

SpotWorld got off on the wrong foot with me, asking for permission to send me emails, update my Facebook timeline, send me notifications about updates, and spam all my friends with messages about SpotWorld before I was even able to try out the app.

After picking my way through that minefield of questions, I chose my home town from the list of three dozen or so pre-loaded cities and gave some of the saved itineraries a peek. For Atlanta, there are only three, submitted by two users. "Classic Atlanta" routes people to The Varsity (ick!), the World of Coca-Cola (cute, but generic), the High Museum of Art (cool), Centennial Olympic Park (really?), the Margaret Mitchell House (okay), and Turner Field (okay).

I scoured a number of other user-submitted itineraries in other cities I've visited and found very few that held any appeal for me. That's to be expected, perhaps -- after all, itineraries are personal by nature, driven by each individual's sense of what constitutes a good time. And therein lies the problem with SpotWorld: instead of making the process of finding a great itinerary easier, it just substitutes one kind of drudgery (sorting through dozens of possible trip destinations) for another (sorting through dozens of itineraries submitted by others).

The interactive map feature is promising, as it pins the entire library of "spots" you can visit to a location-aware Google map. The maps make it easy to get a sense of how far you are from local points of interest, but, because the app hinges on user-submitted data, the information presented about each point of interest is pretty thin at this point.

Perhaps in an effort to mask how thin the actual content currently is, SpotWorld also incorporates photos and text articles on some local sights. Your enjoyment of these will vary, though, based on how much you enjoy hearing a robotic female voice read Wikipedia articles aloud.

Frankly? TripAdvisor.com's iPhone app -- because that site has a *massive* user-submitted database already in place -- does a better job of identifying, ranking, and mapping real points of interest. And after seeing Plnnr's almost magical ability to identify local hotspots *and* integrate them into a real itinerary (complete with walking tours, how long to spend at each point, and how long it takes to get from A to B), SpotWorld's user-submitted content and very basic lists of local sights to see don't impress.

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