Pho Tau Bay (spotted by "Orange Smile")

Here’s something new for all you foodies (…or for people like me who just want to use their smartphones in strange ways).  Check out the wonderful world of Foodspotting, an new application that allows you to take picture of a food, say what it is, and pin it (with geolocation) to the restaurant where you got it.

Food has always been a visual medium – how food looks changes its appeal to our senses. Foodspotting just takes that one step further. Not only do you see a picture of the dish, but you can see how many other Foodspotters have eaten (“nommed”) it, which functions as a sort of peer recommendation.

Let’s say you’re on 14th Street and you’re hungry.  Type in your location and see pics of the food in your immediate vicinity. But you don’t just want any food, you want Pho Bo. Search it; pho that’s been Foodspotted will pop up, along with how many people recommend it.

But Foodpotting is also a game: like Foursquare, you earn points for foodspotting, or for tagging certain types of foods in pictures.  Or if you’re the first to Foodspot a certain restaurant’s pho and another user “noms” it after you, you also get points. Check out the rules here.

So how does anyone expect to make money off this? According to this TechCrunch post, “The natural idea is to become popular enough that restaurants and brands want to partner with the service to promote themselves.”

“It’s kind of like pumping a scent out of your bakery window to draw people in,” Foodspotting’s creator, Alexa Andrzejewski, says.

The iPhone app is on sale today; check it out.

Warning: do not browse food pictures when you are hungry and food is not within reach. Your stomach will hate you.