GroupRecipes.com

=Grouprecipes.com= [|http://www.grouprecipes.com]

Description
Founded in 2006, Kristopher Lederer, based in San Diego created [|grouprecipes.com] where social networking and image tagging are combined in a social 'cooks, food, and recipes' network, where users can create connections among themselves through similar tastes, the enjoyment of a recipe, or by being 'cooking friends'. It also allows sharing, rating, and indexing of a range of recipes, varying from original and unique recipes to simple and quick ones.

Analysis
The site is useful for all types of users from intermediate to expert cooks and food lovers. Although there are some novice recipes, more advanced recipes do not explain what some of the recipes are and where to get them, as well as uncommon cooking terms.

As a social networking system, it provides numerous points of interaction: comments, taste compatibility, cooking friends, tags, recipe ratings, suggested alterations to recipes, recipe 'groups', personal profiles (which include a lot of information on food preferences that could potentially spark conversations), and recommended restaurants via google maps. As a result, people can meet others with similar interests, and even find users who live in the same city.

It also accomodates many user goals such as those that are looking for a specific recipe, similar recipes, a recipe with a particular flavour (such as zesty), a recipe with a particular main ingredient, finding the most popular recipes, going back to recent views, or browsing random recipes. In addition, it integrates applications such as RSS feeds and del.ic.ious for up-to-date listings of new recipes being added to the site and other technologies such as being able to email recipes or send them to cell phones. However, the site's users are mostly limited to North Americans, thus limited the range of recipes as well as the 'authenticities' of some of the foreign dishes listed.

For the multicultural foods group project, a similar system could be used and enhanced by including a history section to recipes, where who the users learned the recipe from can be credited or a cultural/ethnic origin can be explained, a map of where it is from, and up-to-date event listings of festivals, public potlucks, and related community centre programs. It would also be useful for the site to be available in different languages.