Besides going to a PTA meeting, I mean…

I recently stumbled across GroupRecipes.com, a website that lets you post recipes and find compatible cookers - connect with people sharing recipes who also share your tastes.

I like to cook, and I have made some pretty good stuff, so I signed up and entered a few recipes. Almost instantly I had comments and someone pinging to be my friend (you are auto-notified when your friends post new recipes).

Cool! It’s… astonishing. The site is a bit buggy - like when I left a comment it indicated I said it 38 years ago, and trying to get back to edit my profile was a “Where’s Waldo” exercise - hard to find.

But… as a viral website, and a Beta at that, it works really well. I searched on “hash browns” and there are over a hundred recipes.

So what does it take to be viral? Here’s my short list…

1. A profile: you can’t connect with people if you aren’t, well… someone
2. Common interest: easy to see the common interest here: it’s food. But that’s not all - it’s actually FOOD that we both like, and like to cook
3. Connections: make it easy to connect. Add a friend, that’s obvious… but what about the non-obvious stuff? GroupRecipes has an algorithm that tries to find recipes it thinks you will like… and shows your “taste compatibility” with other people.

Short enough… but hard to do. I haven’t figured it out… yet…

tagged: food, social, viral