I’m looking for a hotel in San Francisco right now.  I know the city a bit but I really don’t know it well enough to browse a bunch of hotels and decide where I want to stay.  My biggest problem is optimizing the ratio of cost:cool.  Cool is location, hotel style, and silly perks like a great bar that’s open late or a swimming pool.  The very last thing on my mind is which room in the hotel I want.  If I don’t like my room, I’ll just ask to transfer when I get there.  Room77.com seems like technology for its own sake and until they help me find the perfect hotel based on my subjective experience of the world, I won’t use it.

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Today I learned that Nobu has a $25 Prix Fixe lunch.  Nobu is famous and often discussed, and with locations around the world it’s known for being really upscale and also perhaps a bit overpriced.  In my opinion, the Prix Fixe lunch is a total steal because the portions are generous.  Yet I’m completely aware that not everyone I know, let alone everyone out there, would share this view.  This would only be a suitable recommendation for certain people under certain circumstances.  And it’s for this reason that I think the internet does a bad job of surfacing particular kinds of information.  There simply isn’t an efficient way to navigate between expert opinion and the voices from the crowd.

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Or at the very least, why isn’t there a social search feature that would help me find nearby venue recommendations?  With all the data it would even be interesting to “profile” users and help them interact with new venues.  I would love to learn that people like me (who check in frequently at certain coffee shops, travel once a month, and drink at Kenmare) also check-in at a given establishment on Friday nights after midnight.

There’s a creep factor here because this kind of service could feel like the wrong kind of technological intervention in our decisions.  But not if it’s done right.  Collaborative filtering works really well on Amazon, etc.  I’d love to see something similar for bars/restos/stores that was accessible on the go.  And obviously a feedback loop could improve the results.

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How could there be so many fans of Coca-Cola???

(via arig)

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As dinner finished the second night of the blizzard in NYC, some friends and I decided we wanted to go to a nightclub. But it was impossible to know which one might be open (or fun) on a night like this. We traipsed through the snow to Southside—closed. We’d wasted half an hour and tired ourselves out. How awesome would it have been to thoroughly friend-source this question?

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The elaborate Aardvark algorithm just shared a question with me about growing hops in the Northeast. Apparently I got this question because of where I went to college…machines must make assumptions that humans never would.

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I just googled “uws cocktails” and the position one result is from Yelp.  It’s a rich thread with plenty of interesting suggestions, but the topic was started nearly 4 years ago on January 26, 2007.  The rollover rate for nyc restaurants and bars is famously high, and though not all this information is useless, surely not all of it is valuable.

Part of the idea behind TruQA is to eliminate the tedious sifting process that invariably accompanies advice and recommendation searches online.  It’s very clearly the case that some people, some of the time, enjoy this hunting process.  There can definitely be a thrill in researching and planning.  But often times a fast, reliable recommendation or answer is all you really want.  And it’s probably a safe bet that this answer is out there in your social graph.

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I find myself falling into habits that aren’t necessarily convenient or pleasurable, they just persist because they’re familiar.

For example, I sometimes buy the same brands I’ve always bought (eg., detergent, oatmeal, coffee).  Even if I’m slightly dissatisfied, I’m afraid to switch.  I can’t really explain this behavior.  Perhaps I don’t like the idea of buying an entire jug of detergent that I wind up not liking.  It would be more annoying to use it for 32 loads than to continue slightly discontented by my current brand.

In addition, I never talk about this problem because it’s not that important to me whether I’m bold enough to try out a tin of McCann’s Steel Cut Irish Oatmeal next time I run out of Quaker Oats.

But when these habits relate to stuff I really do care about, they start to bother me.  When I think about doing a big food shop for a dinner party, I think about Whole Foods.  In my heart of hearts, living in NYC, I think this is lame.  I want to friend-source dinner party decisions…but here’s the catch:  it sucks to talk about dinner parties with the people that aren’t invited, and it sucks more to talk about dinner parties with the guests you’re trying to surprise and impress.

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Yesterday I was at Dean & DeLuca in SoHo and I noticed that their entire floor shelving is really this cool modular metal stuff, often with butcher block on top.  I am desperate to buy this for my new apartment and when I asked the people working at Dean & DeLuca no one there had any idea where their shelving comes from.

I just spent a lot of time googling around about this, but my imagination was taxed and exhausted before I came up with any viable leads.  There’s lots of information about butcher block countertops and also lots of pages about Dean & DeLuca, but I couldn’t find anywhere to buy what I’m looking for.

I simply can’t be bothered to google around for more than a few minutes.  I would even pay several dollars to have my idiosyncratic question answered by someone who knows what she’s talking about.

The cool thing about traditional offline behavior is that I would mention my designs on butcher block to a friend or acquaintance and then she might say, “Don’t buy that—it’s tacky—try this or that instead”.  But the internet is killing this.  Sure, I could post on my FB Status that I like shelving, but this isn’t my style.  I don’t want all my friends to read about this like it’s daily news.  I want a discreet way to get an answer and some advice from good sources.

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