8 ms·

Amen. This is why we're building BuenaCarta.com - example page: http://www.buenacarta.com/restaurantes/buenos-aires/palermo-soho/la-paila http://www.buenacarta.

Amen. This is why we're building BuenaCarta.com - example page: http://www.buenacarta.com/restaurantes/buenos-aires/palermo-soho/la-paila http://www.buenacarta.com/restaurantes/buenos-aires/palermo-... (very early alpha)... We're starting with South America but we're planning on releasing a white label version of the product for other markets (and not just restaurants). Our focus is right now on getting reviews 'right', before we start building content, because we still believe there's not a truly good restaurant/bar/store review site whose reviews aren't ranked using hidden magic, astroturfed, or just really, really bland. We've spent a lot of time on the "Open Hours" feature - we want people to view a page and see "Open NOW", "Open Later Today", "Closed Today", etc. so that they're sure it's really open, or it will be when they take a cab across town, or so its really clear they're closed mondays and you don't go all the way there only to find that out. However, we also want to be able to search the data ourselves, and we want it to be localized into two or three languages. So we can't just store the open hours as a string, we need to render the open hours as text but it needs to be stored as data. Generating the English/Spanish/Portuguese from the data is a lot of fun.

nazgulnarsil 17y ago
god i wish there was a US site that aggregated hours info.
- natrius 17y ago
  Yelp does. If you expand the search options, you can limit your search to places that are open now, or at any given time.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- prawn 17y ago
  I've always wondered about an iPhone or web-app for a given location that just showed what was open right then and how soon they closed. Quite often I'm in an area at 10pm with friends wondering what our dining options are. Would obviously need the cooperation of the restaurants themselves though.
  - pretz 17y ago
    Yelp for iPhone (and Pre, and Android) will do that. You can filter your search results by "Open Now". Of course, we don't have perfect data, but we're trying. (I'm a Yelp developer)
    - prawn 17y ago
      I'm in Australia so I don't think you have my area covered?
gridspy 17y ago
That is a very nice looking site in a great niche. Good luck with your venture!
telemachos 17y ago
The "Open Now" badge is just right. Nicely done.
- cubedice 17y ago
  An "Open for another X hours" badge might be even better. I find restaurants are always closing within a half hour or so of deciding to go out to eat.
  - lsc 17y ago
    and for us daysleepers, doing something reasonable for the resteraunts 'will be opening in the next half hour' would be useful. probably also useful for people wanting an early lunch, etc..
  - ubernostrum 17y ago
    The company I work for does CMS and business-directory products for news/media companies; we've been doing the "open until" (and, for places not yet open, "opens at") thing for a while. Example: http://www2.ljworld.com/marketplace/businesses/genovese/ http://www2.ljworld.com/marketplace/businesses/genovese/
- prawn 17y ago
  I reckon put a layer with opening hours and a single-sentence description and maybe even the map further up than the picture. Or the opening hours could be a strip of its own with a marker showing the current day plus the "Open now", "Open for another 3 hours", "Opening in 20 minutes", "Closed today" indicators. Use tints of green for the first two, maybe yellow for the third, and an orange for the fourth? Red might be too strong/negative for closed, so could be saved for places shut down for renovations or closed down completely.
pie 17y ago
Just in case you haven't looked, delivery sites (e.g. seamlessweb, delivery.com) incorporate restaurant hours as a core feature. Not that they're great reference sources, but they're working with the same types of data. Restaurant sites seem to suffer in much the same way as many other industries with typically bad websites (say, real estate, legal firms, and local services). I think this might be due to the difficulty of marketing to small businesses and a general lack of (or perhaps ignorance of) technical savvy. Thanks for the effort to make local restaurants more "usable" -- this type of endeavor can only help if it manages to catch on.
- rubyrescue 17y ago
  Yes we've definitely looked at those type of sites - our whole project started out of the fact that we hate the review sites out there and the delivery sites just want to make a buck on providing the menu, not providing a good source of information on the restaurant themselves. It's becoming more strategic but was borne out of frustration with not finding a good source of information, or seeing bad reviews always at the top, or irrelevant reviews. along the way, opening hours became a source of pain so we detoured a bit to focus on it.
- Mz 17y ago
  Restaurant sites seem to suffer in much the same way as many other industries with typically bad websites (say, real estate, legal firms, and local services). I think this might be due to the difficulty of marketing to small businesses and a general lack of (or perhaps ignorance of) technical savvy. Or maybe it is because a brick-and-mortar entrepreneur has a completely different mindset from the 'Net Set (so to speak) and it's difficult to see the chasm that separates the two, much less cross it.
  - pie 17y ago
    The old-school brick-and-mortar attitude toward web presence is kinda what I was trying to imply by the vague "technical savvy." There's definitely a market out there that cares about small businesses on the wab, regardless of a business's current mindset, goals, or customer acquisition strategy. Either this market is small or unimportant in some fields, or it's difficult to convince business owners otherwise.
derefr 17y ago
For the Open Hours feature, is there a way for a restaurant to tell you (the service) that "we're closed for the next 3.5 days because the cook is sick/waitstaff is on strike/owner is attending a funeral," or something similar? For some reason I seem to end up standing outside quite a few restaurants with little handwritten signs saying "closed", right next to the sign listing the hours they're open (which include the present one.)
- rubyrescue 17y ago
  good point. not yet but that's a great idea. It's a problem in cultures that take long vacations a few times/year but it's not exactly clear what week that vacation will be. It's croudsourceable - someone can make note of the closing before it happens, so you don't have to rely on the restaurant owners.
jmtame 17y ago
Just curious, how do you collect the hours from the businesses you are displaying? Do you use an API to consume this data, or is it manually entered? I bet an algorithm could be built (assuming enough data is flowing) where it automatically adjusts the hours based on when people are checking in. To go along with that, it would show the busiest times, or the "rush hours" based on the density of check-ins at any given time. That's pretty far out there, but with enough traffic flow, you could make predictions and you wouldn't rely on anyone else for that data. You could go further to say "There's a good chance this business is closed because nobody checked in today, and usually there are check-ins." If you plugged in a calendar, your phone could recommend where to go and when to go to avoid lines. It's like you don't even need to think anymore at that point, just obey the orders your phone gives you.
- rubyrescue 17y ago
  we scraped a huge amount of data, then hired people to clean it up. it does scale better down in south america where wages are quite a bit cheaper but it doesn't scale enough. i would say the difference is i can hire someone here to do some data gathering and quality control on-site whereas i'd have to outsource to mturk and get lower quality if we were based in the states. however, since we're converging on a model that's slightly further toward the 'curated' side of the spectrum than a loopt/gowalla/nextstop, i think we're OK with doing some manual editing of things like open hours, and leaving the rest to the community - all of our community editing pieces aren't out yet (we all still have full-time jobs and/or ambitious clients)... I love the check-in statistical analysis concept for data generation or at least quality control. very cool for higher volume locations.
  - pyman 17y ago
    How do you scrape if they are all flash sites!
    - jmtame 17y ago
      you don't scrape the sites individually. there are large directories that exist already.
andrewcooke 17y ago
that would be more useful to me if the search didn't assume that south america == argentina... (at the moment it just confirms some chilean stereoptypes about argentinians... ;o)
laut 17y ago
It would be nice if the page said what country it is and at least what city.

nazgulnarsil 17y ago

god i wish there was a US site that aggregated hours info.

natrius 17y ago
Yelp does. If you expand the search options, you can limit your search to places that are open now, or at any given time.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
prawn 17y ago
I've always wondered about an iPhone or web-app for a given location that just showed what was open right then and how soon they closed. Quite often I'm in an area at 10pm with friends wondering what our dining options are. Would obviously need the cooperation of the restaurants themselves though.
- pretz 17y ago
  Yelp for iPhone (and Pre, and Android) will do that. You can filter your search results by "Open Now". Of course, we don't have perfect data, but we're trying. (I'm a Yelp developer)
  - prawn 17y ago
    I'm in Australia so I don't think you have my area covered?

gridspy 17y ago

That is a very nice looking site in a great niche. Good luck with your venture!

telemachos 17y ago

The "Open Now" badge is just right. Nicely done.

cubedice 17y ago
An "Open for another X hours" badge might be even better. I find restaurants are always closing within a half hour or so of deciding to go out to eat.
- lsc 17y ago
  and for us daysleepers, doing something reasonable for the resteraunts 'will be opening in the next half hour' would be useful. probably also useful for people wanting an early lunch, etc..
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  The company I work for does CMS and business-directory products for news/media companies; we've been doing the "open until" (and, for places not yet open, "opens at") thing for a while. Example: http://www2.ljworld.com/marketplace/businesses/genovese/ http://www2.ljworld.com/marketplace/businesses/genovese/
prawn 17y ago
I reckon put a layer with opening hours and a single-sentence description and maybe even the map further up than the picture. Or the opening hours could be a strip of its own with a marker showing the current day plus the "Open now", "Open for another 3 hours", "Opening in 20 minutes", "Closed today" indicators. Use tints of green for the first two, maybe yellow for the third, and an orange for the fourth? Red might be too strong/negative for closed, so could be saved for places shut down for renovations or closed down completely.

pie 17y ago

Just in case you haven't looked, delivery sites (e.g. seamlessweb, delivery.com) incorporate restaurant hours as a core feature. Not that they're great reference sources, but they're working with the same types of data. Restaurant sites seem to suffer in much the same way as many other industries with typically bad websites (say, real estate, legal firms, and local services). I think this might be due to the difficulty of marketing to small businesses and a general lack of (or perhaps ignorance of) technical savvy. Thanks for the effort to make local restaurants more "usable" -- this type of endeavor can only help if it manages to catch on.

rubyrescue 17y ago
Yes we've definitely looked at those type of sites - our whole project started out of the fact that we hate the review sites out there and the delivery sites just want to make a buck on providing the menu, not providing a good source of information on the restaurant themselves. It's becoming more strategic but was borne out of frustration with not finding a good source of information, or seeing bad reviews always at the top, or irrelevant reviews. along the way, opening hours became a source of pain so we detoured a bit to focus on it.
Mz 17y ago
Restaurant sites seem to suffer in much the same way as many other industries with typically bad websites (say, real estate, legal firms, and local services). I think this might be due to the difficulty of marketing to small businesses and a general lack of (or perhaps ignorance of) technical savvy. Or maybe it is because a brick-and-mortar entrepreneur has a completely different mindset from the 'Net Set (so to speak) and it's difficult to see the chasm that separates the two, much less cross it.
- pie 17y ago
  The old-school brick-and-mortar attitude toward web presence is kinda what I was trying to imply by the vague "technical savvy." There's definitely a market out there that cares about small businesses on the wab, regardless of a business's current mindset, goals, or customer acquisition strategy. Either this market is small or unimportant in some fields, or it's difficult to convince business owners otherwise.

derefr 17y ago

For the Open Hours feature, is there a way for a restaurant to tell you (the service) that "we're closed for the next 3.5 days because the cook is sick/waitstaff is on strike/owner is attending a funeral," or something similar? For some reason I seem to end up standing outside quite a few restaurants with little handwritten signs saying "closed", right next to the sign listing the hours they're open (which include the present one.)

rubyrescue 17y ago
good point. not yet but that's a great idea. It's a problem in cultures that take long vacations a few times/year but it's not exactly clear what week that vacation will be. It's croudsourceable - someone can make note of the closing before it happens, so you don't have to rely on the restaurant owners.

jmtame 17y ago

Just curious, how do you collect the hours from the businesses you are displaying? Do you use an API to consume this data, or is it manually entered? I bet an algorithm could be built (assuming enough data is flowing) where it automatically adjusts the hours based on when people are checking in. To go along with that, it would show the busiest times, or the "rush hours" based on the density of check-ins at any given time. That's pretty far out there, but with enough traffic flow, you could make predictions and you wouldn't rely on anyone else for that data. You could go further to say "There's a good chance this business is closed because nobody checked in today, and usually there are check-ins." If you plugged in a calendar, your phone could recommend where to go and when to go to avoid lines. It's like you don't even need to think anymore at that point, just obey the orders your phone gives you.

rubyrescue 17y ago
we scraped a huge amount of data, then hired people to clean it up. it does scale better down in south america where wages are quite a bit cheaper but it doesn't scale enough. i would say the difference is i can hire someone here to do some data gathering and quality control on-site whereas i'd have to outsource to mturk and get lower quality if we were based in the states. however, since we're converging on a model that's slightly further toward the 'curated' side of the spectrum than a loopt/gowalla/nextstop, i think we're OK with doing some manual editing of things like open hours, and leaving the rest to the community - all of our community editing pieces aren't out yet (we all still have full-time jobs and/or ambitious clients)... I love the check-in statistical analysis concept for data generation or at least quality control. very cool for higher volume locations.
- pyman 17y ago
  How do you scrape if they are all flash sites!
  - jmtame 17y ago
    you don't scrape the sites individually. there are large directories that exist already.

andrewcooke 17y ago

that would be more useful to me if the search didn't assume that south america == argentina... (at the moment it just confirms some chilean stereoptypes about argentinians... ;o)

laut 17y ago

It would be nice if the page said what country it is and at least what city.