Cooking with Friends - GroupRecipes

If there is one thing that people like to talk over and about, it's food. That's the premise behind the new Web 2.0 foodie site GroupRecipes. Blending a searchable recipe database with mini restaurant reviews and an online community, GroupRecipes strives to give its users a total food experience, from cooking to dining out to dishing about likes and dislikes.

Signing up for GroupRecipes is one of the most user-friendly experiences ever experienced. From filling out forms where Javascript features tell you immediately whether your username is already taken to sliders that let you move through the likes and dislikes sections quickly, most of the drudgery usually associated with signing up for a new site is completely absent.

Of course, after you've registered, you can add your own recipes, join a group, create a group, search recipes, search area restaurants (using the near obligatory tie-in to Google Maps you've come to expect with Web 2.0 sites), add your own restaurants, and before you know it, you've spent two hours doing nothing but reading about and writing about food.

GroupRecipes is undeniably addictive, and the combination of recipe search features like AllRecipes.com and the community aspect of it, including allowing users to add ratings to recipes they've tried out adds a much more user-friendly feel. The biggest concern, however, is what will happen to GroupRecipes once a site like FoodNetwork decides to implement some of the more interactive features. It will definitely be a race to get a solid user base before a bigger company tries to create the same environment on their existing site.

Source: Museum of Modern Betas