The more observant of you have noticed that I, Mr. Rich, have started contributing to the SeamlessWeb Blog (don't worry, Matt is still here too).  The less observant of you just read the first sentence and then scrolled down to check the last few posts. A couple of initial orders of business:

• I want to make this blog your destination for information and updates on the world of SeamlessWeb and of takeout and delivery food in general. As with our site, we expect the best ideas to come from our users/readers, so please email me your thoughts on how we can make this page better and more useful. What can we do to give you more insight into SeamlessWeb? Thanks!

• On a quick programming note, please notice the del.i.cio.us bookmarks in the sidebar. This is where we will be posting links to relevant articles going forward.

Online ordering is the easiest way to order your meals, but what if you like to go to the restaurant to pick up your food, rather than ordering for delivery? Well, SeamlessWeb has started a beta program in the Murray Hill area of NYC that allows you to order for pick up, or takeout (however you like to say it!). Look for the new functionality the next time you place an order and be sure to bring your ID to the restaurant when you go to grab your meal.

We'll be rolling out this new functionality on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis going forward. To request that we add pick-up ordering in your neighborhood, send us an email.

Do you work in an office where people order food?

Well, if the company pays for your food, you should definitely get a SeamlessWeb corporate account.  Your company will save money and time, while you and your co-workers will never need to save receipts and fill out and submit expense report for overtime meals and/or catering orders.

If the company doesn’t pay for the food and everyone just orders on their own, you need to check out our new Virtual Café program that will give all your co-workers a 30% discount off all SeamlessWeb orders for TWO MONTHS! To help your company participate in this program, just have your office manager, controller, or head of HR email us at myseamlessweb@seamlessweb.com to get the details (very simple).

Become the most popular person in the office and spread the word about how SeamlessWeb makes life just that much easier!

 

 

That’s right, we’re giving away free breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a week to one lucky member. The winner will be awarded a maximum of 3 $25 orders per day for 7 days. Just send us your email here to enter yourself to win! Talk about kicking off the new year in style.

• Cupping Room Café — Soho/West Village
  Cupping Room is one of the oldest restaurants in Soho and features an amazing brunch menu as well as one of the Downtown’s best burgers. Try it topped with avocado and jalapeños!
• Harry's — Financial District
  Harry’s specializes in cold shellfish platter, strip steak, porterhouse, and lamb chops. Amazing onion rings!
• Limon — Murray Hill
  A nice mix of hot and cold appetizers gets you ready for a wide variety of surf and turf entrees from this popular Turkish restaurant. Try the pan-seared Halibut with grilled vegetables and lemon caper sauce.
• Chop't — Union Square
  This creative, fresh, and healthy salad spot features delicious dressings prepared from original recipes. Chop’t always maintain the highest levels of food quality, service, and cleanliness.
• Serafina — Midtown West
  An honest approach to Italian food and service. "Welcome Home..." is their motto.
• Blossom Café — Upper West Side
  Blossom Café offers fresh, organic, vegetarian and vegan cuisine straight from local farms. Kosher!
• Papa Johns — Upper East Side
  In their words... "Better ingredients makes better pizza."

Over Thanksgiving weekend we launched a cool new ‘tagging’ feature on all versions of SeamlessWeb.

What is tagging?

Tagging is a great feature that is used on many other popular social networking sites. A strong example is Flickr.com, a picture sharing site. On Flickr, people can ‘tag’ photos with any number of keywords that describe the photo. By doing this, they make it easier for other people to find pictures that feature whatever the ‘tag’ is. For example: this photo has been tagged by Flickr users with 'dog, pet, bearded collie’ etc, so it will show up in the results for anyone searching for these words.

How does tagging work on SeamlessWeb?

By adding the ability to ‘tag’ dishes on SeamlessWeb menus, you can share what you know about each dish with everyone else in the SeamlessWeb community.

Submitting Tags:

When you mouse-over an item, there is a small icon to the right of the item name . When you click on that icon, you’ll see a page where you can submit your ‘tags’ for that item. For example, you might add the word ‘crispy’ for your favorite calamari dish, ‘spicy’ for a particularly hot Thai dish, or maybe ‘sausage peppers onions mushrooms pepperoni' for a supreme pizza. There really are no rules here - just use tags that are helpful and relevant to the dish. You can add as many tags as you want- just type a string of words, separated by a space (no commas necessary).

Displaying Tags:

Users who mouse-over an item will see the tags that have been submitted for the item by other users (just below the regular item description).

At the top of each menu, you’ll see a 'tag cloud' which displays the most frequently applied tags for that menu. Clicking any of the tags in the tag cloud will highlight all items on the menu below that have been tagged with that word. Check out this example.

We’re really excited about this feature and hope you are too. Adding tags should go a long way towards organizing the collective wisdom of all SeamlessWeb users so you’ll be more informed about each of the millions of dishes on SeamlessWeb.

Yet it’s not enough for us to just add the feature to the site – tagging is a social feature that depends on the input of great users like you to help it reach its full potential, so get taggin’!

This weekend, we launched a cool new enhancement to the menus on SeamlessWeb - most popular dishes! We're highlighting the 10 most frequently ordered items on each menu (with a cute little red star) and listing them to the right of each menu. The most popular dishes are totally dependent on the SeamlessWeb community - whatever the people order the most shows up - so not only can you benefit from knowing which dishes are popular, you can help decide!

We like to think that this is yet another way SeamlessWeb makes ordering delivery food easier and smarter. Let us know what you think by dropping a comment!

 You know those great pictures of restaurants and their food that you started seeing pop up on SeamlessWeb earlier this year? Those are a part of our ‘Menuplus’ program, which encourages restaurants to submit photos, featured dishes, chef bios, and other descriptions – all intended to help you make a far more informed decision than you ever could when ordering offline.

Yesterday we had our 500^th restaurant sign up for Menuplus which we’re really excited about, and we hope you are too. After all, the more restaurants that join Menuplus, the more informative content and pictures we’ll be able to deliver to smart users like you!

To celebrate, we’re giving away 25 free SeamlessWeb T-Shirts. To get one, just email me your address and size to mjohnson@seamlessweb.com

Since we've started publishing user reviews for each restaurant, we've been getting tons of great, helpful reviews every day. Of course, we've also gotten a lot of not-so-great, not-so-helpful reviews. Too many for us to manage, in fact. So in the spirit of community, we've decided to give the power to the people (umm, you) to decide which reviews should stay and which should go.

Now when you click the 'User Reviews' tab on a restaurant's page, you will see links next to each review that allow you to label it as helpful or not helpful. The total number of clicks appears in parentheses, letting you know which reviews your fellow SeamlessWebers have found most and least helpful. The most recent reviews display at the top by default, but you have the option of sorting by most helpful or highest rated if you prefer.

We hope this will make the thousands of user reviews that we're displaying more useful when deciding where or what to eat. As always, let us know what you think by posting a comment below.

Using SeamlessWeb got a little bit faster today, as we updated our cookies to skip returning users who don't use the corporate site past the homepage.  This should streamline the ordering experience for returning members who allow cookies on their browsers.

Edit: I neglected to mention that you may need to erase the SeamlessWeb cookies saved in your browser, restart the browser, and then visit SeamlessWeb.com again for these changes to take effect.

Let us know if you have any issues by posting a comment.

We recently launched SeamlessWeb's personal ordering service in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.  Be sure to shoot your friends in those cities a referral email and we'll send you $5 for each person that tries SeamlessWeb!