Webware

SAN FRANCISCO--Here at the Web 2.0 Expo, one of Wednesday morning's talks was to feature Blaine Cook, Twitter's lead architect, talking about the Jabber protocol and "building the real-time Web."

The problem: Reports had surfaced earlier that morning that Blaine Cook was leaving the company. Awkward.

Cook told several blog sites that he was indeed leaving, attributing it to the fact that he was moving to the U.K. But a source close to the snafu told CNET News.com that Cook had indeed been ousted from his role at the microblogging start-up in one capacity or another. In an e-mail to the Silicon Alley Insider, Cook called the departure "amicable," that he was out as of two weeks earlier, and that he would likely stay on as an adviser to the company.

After the panel, Cook told CNET News.com that there were "a number of factors" behind his departure, and that he would be relocating to the U.K. in the fall. In the meantime, he said, he was exploring a number of possibilities. He said he'll probably end up in a role within a U.K. company to avoid the hassle of a semi-regular across-the-pond commute. With regard to the fact that he took the stage at the conference just hours after the news broke that he was leaving the company, he said, "It's been kind of an insane morning."

Luckily for Cook, his talk at Web 2.0 wasn't directly about Twitter. It was also a lecture, not a panel, so there was no moderator to poke around the issue. And it was tech-heavy, with lines of code dominating the presentation screen, which meant that the folks showing up to listen were more interested in geekspeak than gossip.

Bloggers were eager to pounce on the news as a consequence of Twitter's notorious scaling problems, which Cook should have been able to keep under control. But many members of the developer community immediately came out in support of him: Google engineer Kevin Marks said (ironically on Twitter) that Cook "has real-world experience of hard scaling issues that is worth more than any bloviating theories."

And a member of the developer community told CNET News.com that Cook's skills were highly respected and that now that the news broke, he'd likely be inundated with job offers.

Got some stuff sitting in your pantry that's been there a little too long? The expiration date is just around the corner, and you want to cook something new that doesn't require going to the store? Lucky for you there's SuperCook, a service that lets you figure out things to eat based on what you've got. Unlike some other services that do this, SuperCook separates the wheat from the chaff (poor choice of phrases I know) by showing you the recipes you can make with what's in your kitchen, and those that require a few extra items to match up with their original recipe.

Let SuperCook know what's in your kitchen, and it'll do the rest.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

To add items to your virtual kitchen, you can simply start typing names in. SuperCook's got a suggest-as-you-type feature that makes it pretty simple to add a lot of items quickly like you would with tags on Flickr. Once they've been added they stay there until you remove them, meaning you can come back to the site later on and make a few adjustments to get updated recipes. This is especially helpful with spices, as a few added or missing ones can change hundreds of recipes at a time. Users who sign up can get their kitchens permanently saved, along with the option to bookmark recipes they like.

In addition to its recipe recommendation by ingredient service, SuperCook gives you Amazon.com-like recommendations for other ingredients you should pick up based on what you've got laying about. What's interesting here is that these recommended ingredients change based on what type of dish you're working on, as the service lets you cycle between entrees, starters, and deserts. It's also a super-simple way to stock up your virtual kitchen without having to type what's there.

I like this service already, but it's in a very crowded space. Other sites like Allrecipes, RecipeMatcher, Google Base (recipe version), and Snacksby have been around a little longer and offer similar functionality that most folks will be happy with. I still prefer SuperCook's virtual kitchen idea and ingredient recommendations, which I think make it more useful than most.

Kristina Nielsen has a growing collection of recipes, culled from friends, family members, magazines, books, Web sites and the occasional food package label. She keeps some of them in a binder and some loosely shoved in a drawer; some are neatly printed, some hastily scribbled on notes. Others live online in her recipe boxes on various sites. Together they represent the culmination of the 10 years she's spent learning how to cook new dishes. Now, a company called TasteBook wants to take Kristina's recipe collection--and those of amateur chefs like her--into the 21st century.

A sample of a customized cookbook printed by TasteBook.

(Credit: TasteBook)

TasteBook, which plans to launch Tuesday, hopes to create an easy way for people to find recipes and print out their own customized, hardcover cookbooks. A number of self-service publishing services like Blurb, Lulu and Xlibris already allow people to upload their own pictures and text and publish a hardcover book. TasteBook takes the basic idea of those services and caters the process specifically to making recipe books.

TasteBook has two key features: first, it simplifies searching for recipes online by indexing recipes from all over the Web into one list of search results. It then allows people to select recipes from those search results and print them out in a professional-looking cookbook.

At launch, the TasteBook site will include about 25,000 recipes from Epicurious, but the company plans to expand its service to include recipes from other sites beginning next year. People can automatically important their Epicurious recipe boxes and can also upload their own recipes and include them in the books they print.

For $34.95, a user can print a hardcover binder with handpicked cover art and up to 100 recipes with their own comments added. If all 100 recipes aren't used initially, TasteBook will issue credits for the remaining recipes, which can be printed out later and added to the binder or sent to friends.

To avoid copyright issues with the sites that publish recipes, TasteBook licenses recipes from their original publishers when they are printed out. And on TasteBook.com, users can see only previews of recipes. To view a recipe in its entirety, they have to click through to the original recipe site. In this way, TasteBook hopes to drive traffic back to those sites and focus more on recipe discovery and printing rather than getting into the business of creating recipes themselves.

Company co-founder Kamran Mohsenin likens the online interface to that of another bit of well-known software. "We're basically doing the iTunes model," Mohsenin said. "If you know how to use iTunes, you know how to use TasteBook." In addition to acting as an intermediary between consumers and content publishers, TasteBook has a service similar to iTunes Essentials, which are pre-compiled playlists users can browse and use to discover new artists and songs. TasteBook currently has about a dozen featured collections, such as kid-friendly or vegetarian recipes, that users can browse to get ideas.

TasteBook is launching simply, but the company has plans to expand in the coming year by forming new partnerships with other recipe sites, adding more featured recipe collections with various themes and authors and by supporting user-generated photos. They'll also be "turning up the social factor because (cooking is) a very social thing," Mohsenin said. But out of the gate, they're not attempting to become another social networking site.

The company was founded by two former employees of Ofoto (now Kodak Gallery)--Ofoto co-founder Mohsenin and former Chief Technical Architect Greg Schroeder. Don't be surprised to see them delve into other niches eventually. It's the dedication to a specific hobby that sets TasteBook apart from other types of publishing services that don't get involved in the content itself, Mohsenin said.

"We're creating a new category (of publishing), called the custom book. The idea is that we actually understand what 1 cup of milk means. So we can go to Chow or Epicurious and crawl and parse those recipes, and we can attach nutrition data because we understand what a recipe is," he said. That same TasteBook model could be applied to any number of do-it-yourself hobbies with a passionate user base with specialized knowledge and needs.

Update on October 24, 2007: TasteBook announced Tuesday night that it has received funding from CondeNet, publisher of Epicurious.com.

Conde Nast's Epicurious, the granddaddy of culinary Web sites, recently debuted a newly nipped-and-tucked design. The site's modular layout and increased emphasis on community have prompted more than one blogger to declare it "Epicurious 2.0." By making its content easier to find and adding more opportunity for members to interact, Epicurious has managed to stay one step ahead of other "old-media" sites, such as MyRecipes, Time Warner's recently launched foodie portal.

The new Epicurious home page includes more defined white space, larger images, and prominently placed links to community features, including a chat room. Video resources are easier to find, too, via a link in the top navigation bar. Gone are the confusing promos and links to the Epicurious Shop, which competed with editorial content on the front page.

The spare design flows throughout the site. Recipe pages in particular are a lot easier to read, given that (as Faith at Apartment Therapy: Kitchen points out) the first few user opinions are no longer displayed beneath the recipe--a convenience we're happy to sacrifice in favor of a cleaner look. Forums are also easy on the eyes, though I found it frustrating that I had to click each reply within a thread--once I've selected a thread, why not show me the whole conversation?

In a nod to social network sites such as BakeSpace (review) and GroupRecipes (review), Epicurious has beefed up its community features, making it easier to share your own recipes with the network. Member-submitted recipes are still largely segregated from the magazine content and are not included in primary search results--but you are given the option, after searching, to look in "member recipes" for your query terms. I'd prefer if one click could search both databases. The results could still be divided by source--I do like to know whether I'm getting a professionally developed recipe--but this would provide a helpful single-page overview of all the content available.

The redesign also includes some tweaks to member profiles, letting you add an "About Me" paragraph and designate a recipe from your recipe box as "What I'm Cooking Now." You can also check off your food interests from a list of topics that range from Adventurous Eating to Wine and everything in between. What's missing: a friend list, or some other way to indicate your favorite commenters and forum posters. For instance, I would love to be able to designate another member as my culinary mentor and then automatically follow what he/she is cooking.

My colleagues and I agree on one key issue with the new site: Pages are often slow to load. We're hoping speed will improve once traffic settles back into its normal patterns, because in all other respects the redesign is a big step forward for users.

Im cooked, a relatively new video-sharing site focused on cooking, is catching the attention of tons of food blogs today thanks to this video of oddball actor Christopher Walken demonstrating his recipe and technique for roast chicken with pears. Being suckers for such viral marketing, we decided to take a look around the site, which, aside from its foodie slant, is an otherwise straightforward video-sharing community: members can upload and watch videos; join groups focused on specific techniques, cuisines, or ingredients; and create lists of friends and favorites.

Why not just post these vids to YouTube? Well, some people have. But as YouTube and other general-interest video sharing sites grow, it becomes harder to find what you want to watch, and your own shared content risks being lost in the cacophony of voices. Im cooked grew out of a desire to provide a dedicated forum for sharing video recipes with other enthusiastic home cooks.

The site itself isn't much to look at, and as of this writing it's rather sparsely populated. But we love Web-based cooking shows (Feed Me Bubbe and Spatulatta are two favorites) so we're interested to see what people will contribute as the site grows. And, given the popularity of the Food Network, kitchen-based reality TV shows, and Ratatouille--not to mention an endorsement by the man who gave popular culture "More cowbell"--we suspect Im cooked will grow into a fairly lively community.

See also: GroupRecipes and BakeSpace

Yesterday I was reading the PSFK Trend blog and came across a post about several emerging social networks for foodies. I made a New Year's resolution to stop relying on take-out and pizza (an easy habit to fall into in Manhattan, where practically every eating establishment offers free delivery) so I thought I'd check out one of them, BakeSpace, to see if I could pick up some cooking tips.

I quite liked it. The site provides a diverse range of ways for "cookers and cakers" to network (there's apparently an important distinction between people who cook and people who bake). They can find new recipes and food ideas, amass a friends list, and communicate through message boards and a chat room. It's a cute format, too--instead of a profile, you have a "kitchen," where you can share your favorite recipes, audio and video content. And you'd better keep that kitchen tidy, because other members can rate the quality of it. I guess the foodie community can be pretty competitive.

Here is my one gripe: As a piece of technology there is really nothing new or innovative about BakeSpace. Though the front page is cute, the site itself is pretty low-tech in the "it could've been coded in 2001" sense. But think about it: it's a community for kitchen aficionados, not techies. The recipes look mouth-watering. Clicking around on profiles, I can see that quite a few members boast culinary school degrees. The site's easy enough to use, and doesn't appear to be full of bugs. As we see more and more "niche" social networking sites emerge, not all of them will be showing off the latest in Ajax as though it were a pair of designer shoes. Because, the truth is, a lot of niches and subcultures are going to care more about the content than the presentation. And I'd assume that the foodie crowd would be one of them--after all, if it doesn't taste good, it doesn't matter how well it's arranged on the plate.