Once Again, Massachusetts Revolutionizes Supermarket Shopping (Though This Party May Have 99% Less Attendees)
Just when you thought your state was "just okay" or "doing alright," Massachusetts and its many beautiful denizens once-friggin-again blows your socks off in the supermarket department.
This time it comes in the form of Zeer.com, an online review and—surprise!—social networking site centered around—surprise!—supermarket shopping.
Zeer.com hails from Cambridge, the place where Rock Band comes from. It's kinda like Yelp, kinda like any of the billions of social networking tools out there (all of which are stupid ... friend me!). Cautious obsessive shoppers can look up products and see user-generated reviews, nutritional information, and company blather descriptions.
I looked up "beer" and saw a bunch of twelve-packs with neat little stars next to them. Budweiser received one star and came with this nice comment:
Hey I heard this story one time that Anheuser Busch decided one day to clean out the vats in which they make Budweiser. Yeah, so when they got to the bottom they found like 2 inches of MICE BONES. After they cleaned it, the beer tasted terrible apparently. Just sayin.
Zeer.com is simultaneously useful and destined for catastrophic failure. People with severe food allergies may find it neat-o, but then again, they could easily suck the teat of Google. And lonely foodies might find a friend or two who also like drinking mouse bones, but then again, they could easily suck the teat of Facebook or MySpace.
Still, it's a nifty idea and Massachusetts thought of it first, not you and certainly not your inferior state.
[via The Boston Globe]
NeonMadman
Posted to In the News on 2 July 2008
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: boston, cambridge, Harmonix, massachusetts, supermarket
So so terribly Cambridge. The first product on the page when I went there was Zensoy Chocolate Vanilla Swirl Soy Pudding. Not that I have anything against veggie substitutes—having been veggie for 17 years now—but pudding? Come on. And yet it gets five stars!
A quick search on vodka (hey, it's vegetarian) shows 154 products, and practically none with ratings. Maybe they need a specialty zeerbooze.com, so the organo-groovies and the heavy boozers don't get all up in each other's business.
Still, kudos to you, Mass! There's no place like home! (And, strangely, I could totally see my hubby getting into this big time. It involves lists and groceries and the Web, three of his favorite things.)
I think I like this...
Hiya!
I'm the Community Manager of Zeer :D Thanks for the interesting and fascinating review of our site. Definitely the most colorful one I've seen. I loled a lot.
As to Google & Facebook & Myspace teat sucking -- I'm going to have to say, nay. We're all adults here and there is enough internet pie to go around. And pie is our specialty of course.
Of course, like Yelp.com, we hope to use organic search rankings (and we're already seeing a TON of traffic from that) to grow our site and individual product pages. However, Google is just conduit and our success will not be dependent on search alone. Social sites might give us a leg up in getting the word out, but our success is dependent on the quality of our reviews and the quality of our members and what Zeer can bring to their grocery shopping routine. We want to whittle down the clutter of grocery shopping. There are too many products and no unbiased place online to look them over before going to the store.
Keep in mind, we're a research tool with social networking aspects. We're a way to find food products that don't suck.
Can you imagine how awesome coupons would be if you didn't have to clip them like a little old biddy? What if you you got coupons only for products that you were going to shop for this week? What if you could get food suggestions like Netflix based on what you love? These are questions we intend to answer. No cheating. No looking over the shoulder of Google, Facebook or Myspace. :D
I'd like to think we're destined for greatness and not food FAIL. We've got a couple tricks up our so so Cambridge sleeve. I just hope you like magic :D
Shannon B.
Zeer.com
Thanks for visiting, Shannon. I'm glad I wasn't especially brutish or rude because I hate getting called out on my own ignorance. Huzzah for me!
Best of luck,
Neonmadman
No problem, NMM! I like popping in :Dd
You weren't brutish or rude at all. You're just expressing your opinion and getting the word out about new trends, tech and web news.
:D
I personally love to hear lots of different view points. Criticisms and commentary always makes us stronger. Don't fear getting called out -- getting called out is a great way to start the conversation :D