If you love sharing photos of your meals on Instagram, you need to know about Burpple: a social food guide for sharing your favorite meals. Foodies like you feel passionate about their dining experiences and want to help others by giving recommendations and championing their favorite restaurants. Looking at photos of beautifully plated food leaves you feeling inspired and excited to get in the kitchen and try new things. Burpple’s mission is to connect the world through our one common language: food. If you’re interested in taking that passion for Instagram a step further by joining a community of passionate foodies, keep reading to learn more about this budding social network.
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Getting Started
Launch the app and you’re greeted with an intro that shares what Burpple is all about in a few carefully chosen words and beautiful photos. The designers have created a feeling of looking in the window at a party, eliciting a desire to join in and have some fun. It’s warm, welcoming and nostalgic, just like gathering at the table with good friends and family.
Launch the app and you instantly want to join the party. The user interface is fun, fresh and focused on connecting foodies who want to share their dining experiences.
The folks at Burpple haven’t re-invented the wheel; instead they’ve customized it to fit their funky little car. Pinterest users will find the setup process quite familiar: the app offers a selection of dishes from different eateries and cuisines, asking you to “Select 5 delicacies you like” so they can learn a bit about your tastes. Location based services are essential to the usability of this app, and immediately Burpple suggests “Recommended users in your city” so you can jump right into the community of foodies.
Much like Pinterest, Burpple seeks to entice you into the community by encouraging you to follow Tastemakers. The app offers up a selection of images for you to pick favorites so it can learn more about your tastes.
I personally favor Mediterranean food and pastries, but found the choices heavily weighted towards Asian cuisine. This is a reflection of the fact that Burpple was founded in Singapore and in their description, it’s “Asia’s fastest growing food social network.” The mission of this company is to connect the world through food moments, and as they build a global community of users the app will become more diverse and useful.
The Burpple Community
The home screen is an updating feed of burps from Tastemakers you follow. A “burp” is a food moment uploaded by a user. It may be a meal at a restaurant, dinner at home or a food festival. The app creators have smartly encouraged this Burpple lingo, which makes users feel like part of a special club.
A burp is a food moment uploaded by users. Daniel reburped this Apple Pie Ice-cream Cookie from user Steve G and you can see where he ate it plus add your own comments or reburp it.
The burps are very much like a Pinterest feed, some are original moments shared by users, others are “reburps,” or moments favorited by Tastemakers you follow. Burpple uses location-based services to tag uploaded photos with date and location. You’ll also see the meal category (cooked at home, must try, special occasion, etc.). Like Instagram, Burpple encourages users to make comments on photos and interact with the community.
Janice is a great example of a power user: she’s really customized her feed to reflect her unique personality.
The app makes is simple and intuitive, with features that are easy to figure out. Tap the arrow box to reburp a post, which means adding it to your file of food moments (in whichever category you choose). This action will be shared with others who follow you. Selecting the heart icon means you “liked” the food moment, but this action isn’t recorded anywhere for your reference. You can also share burps with the outside world via Email, SMS or Twitter.
It’s fun to see what people around the globe are eating and be inspired by new food ideas.
Burpple has two purposes: to help users record meaningful food experiences and to connect users in a social network. The app is integrated with Facebook and Instagram so you can invite your friends and import your photos easily. As you delve deeper into the app looking for Tastemakers to follow you’ll discover all kinds of interesting people. You’ll find power users who create all kinds of interesting categories like Janice’s “Must Try Before You Die” and “Suffocated By Chocolate.”
I’ve created my Burpple profile, uploading my own images for the banner and renaming categories to make them my own.
Like I mentioned before, most of the users at the moment seem to be from Asia, but as this app gains in popularity, the community will become more diverse. It’s really interesting to browse the feeds of Tastemakers from different parts of the world and see what they are eating. You’ll discover tons of inspiration and new flavor ideas. As you follow more people and spend time customizing your profile, the app becomes more interesting to use.
Your Food Journal
Uploading your own food moments and organizing them into themed boxes is fun and easy. Just press the camera button to take a photo while you’re in a restaurant or access your camera roll for a moment that you’d like to curate. Burpple describes this as a “brand new way to food blog” and hopes to use the community restaurant recommendations to serve as a restaurant guide.
Uploading your own food moments is fun and easy. Take photos with the camera or access your camera roll, then choose from the fun set of filters and write a description.
Once you’ve got a photo uploaded, the app has a selection of foodie filters to enhance your image, all with cute little food inspired names like Tapas and Tiramisu. Write a short description and use the location services so the app can find the restaurant, or add a custom location. The app helps you assign your food moment to a category or create a new one.
I shared a home cooked meal with the community, left. The app helps you to categorize your food moments by theme, right.
Though some of Burpples features have yet to catch up with its bravado (finding restaurants “wherever you are,” social menus and a not so global community), the capturing and sharing of your own food moments works beautifully and it’s a lot of fun. The Wishlist feature is a great idea—it’s where you save food moments from other tastemakers, like a culinary bucket list. Use it for restaurants to dine in, exotic foods to taste, or festivals to visit. Burpple knows the way to a foodie’s heart is through their stomach.
Conclusion
Burpple is a fun, beautifully designed app that brings together people who love food. It’s really a great idea, but the app is still going through some growing pains. The app has a few major issues. First, most of the users are in Asia, so the app doesn’t really function as a restaurant guide to help you find “interesting places to eat, wherever you are.” Second, I live in Ireland and the search feature came up with absolutely zero restaurants. I’ve made every effort to ensure my location services are turned on, so it’s disappointing the app can’t find anything near me. I also tried searching but city names give no results, so I guess you can only search users and restaurant names? Zero is never a good answer. The app should at least display the nearest results, even if they are thousands of miles away.
Still, I think Burpple has good genes and the app will grow up to achieve all its dreams. I say download the app if you love sharing food moments and interacting with foodies across the globe. The team at Burpple is really interested in user feedback and seems to be working to improve the experience all the time. Help these guys create a global community of food lovers and you’ll be rewarded with a rich, engaging experience in the end.
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