Saturday, August 18, 2007

Recipes in a Web 2.0 world

Flickr for Recipes?

I came across RecipeZaar the other day while trying to figure out what to do with some of the zucchini bounty we have in the refrigerator (looks like we'll make Zucchini Moussaka next week).

The site is pretty cool, it lets you collect recipes in personal cookbooks and upload your own recipes. It also has some pretty neat features when you're looking at individual recipes, such as a Nutrition Facts table for each recipe, scaling of the recipe to the number of servings you need, and conversion between US and metrics units. In addition there are features to create an entire menu and a shopping list based on the recipes you're looking at.

But what makes the site really cool when you're interested in social networks and web 2.0 sites, are the community features. Members can easily rate each recipe and describe their experience preparing and eating it. In addition, the site allows for sending messages to other members, so for each recipe, you can send a message to the person who created it. Some of the features require a premium membership ($25/year) , but the site is plenty useful with a free basic membership.

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