Alfred, The iOS Butler, Serves Up Serendipity On A Silver Platter
Back in July I wrote about a nifty iPhone app called Alfred. It's a sort of Yelp meets Pandora: you tell it what kind of restaurants you like, and then it tries to make some solid recommendations.
Context & Ripple Effects
Alfred is TechCrunch revisiting an app it flagged in July: an iPhone service pitched as Yelp meets Pandora, where users state their restaurant tastes and receive recommendations tuned to them rather than to crowd ratings. It lands in a stretch when single-purpose 'personal assistant' iOS apps were multiplying — Greplin's iPhone life-organizer shipped just weeks earlier in August 2011.
The competitive backdrop is an iPhone restaurant-discovery market defined by directory-style players: Urbanspoon had been a fixture since its plug in an iPhone ad back in November 2008, so Alfred's bet is that taste-learning beats browsing listings.
First-order effects
- Alfred puts itself in direct competition with listing-driven discovery apps like Urbanspoon and Yelp on the iPhone, offering profile-based picks instead of searchable directories.
Second-order effects
- If taste-profile recommendations stick with users, incumbent review platforms face pressure to layer preference learning onto their own search, and the growing pile of single-function assistant apps — Greplin among them — intensifies the fight for home-screen real estate.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward discovery products generally migrating from user-driven search toward algorithms that infer preferences, extending the Pandora model from music into local services.
The trend: Local discovery on the iPhone is shifting from crowd-sourced directories toward personalized recommendation engines built on stated user tastes.