Kevin Rose, co-founder of long-suffering Digg, recently started a new company called Milk and they’ve just released their first app called Oink.
Oink describes itself as “an easy way to rate and rank the things around you.” So what does that mean exactly? Well, instead of rating an actual restaurant that you visit, you can rate the individual dishes. Let’s say your favorite spot does a fantastic hamburger. Using a series of tags (e.g. #hamburger) you can rank it highly. Then, other people in the area can search around their vicinity for #hamburger (or any other hashtag like #tea or #coffee) and find things that way, instead of just reading about how great an individual institution is.
Here’s a video from Kevin Rose himself describing how it works:
It’s a nice idea because it’s ranking things rather than places. When it comes to sushi for example, and you’re a huge fan of a particular type, it doesn’t necessarily matter where you can get great sushi, you want to find where you can great #maguro or great #saba instead.
It’s really going to have to catch on and people are going to have to get out there and tag stuff a lot for it to be effective. Also, it’s going to rely on users being honest and trustworthy with their views and not ‘gaming’ the system too much. Oink has the opportunity to be equally as useful as something like Yelp or Nosh.
The app is free to download and probably worth a shot if you’re always on the look out for the good things around you.
