Until now, I’ve thought of Foodspotting mostly as an iPhone app which my wife uses to share photos of her meal when we dine out. She loves it. So do enough other people that a million pictures have been uploaded since the app’s launch, making it feel a bit like an Instagram that’s entirely devoted to things you can eat..

But there’s probably a limit to how many folks there are in the world who want to obsessively photograph food. So the new version of Foodspotting that launched this week is designed to broaden the app’s appeal. The photo sharing’s still there–but it feels more like one feature in an app whose primary purpose is to let large numbers of people find and see the best dishes at local restaurants before they place an order.

The new Foodspotting lets you browse popular dishes at nearby restaurants, or pull up a “picture menu” of a specific eatery. Lists of picks from media outlets such as Zagat’s and New York magazine supplement the recommendations from Foodspotting users. And there’s a section of Specials–which consisted of 50% discounts at several restaurants when I checked–which is the start of Foodspotting’s strategy for making money.

With its new emphasis on finding places to go and stuff to eat, Foodspotting feels a bit more like a competitor to traditional sources of restaurant reviews such as Yelp. But the similarities don’t run deep. Foodspotting still focuses on pictures and thumbs-up ratings, not full-blown critiques. And there’s no way to steer other users away from disappointing dishes by giving anything a thumbs down.

Judging from my experience so far, Foodspotting also doesn’t have a Yelplike critical mass of content practically everywhere. At the moment, I’m in Newton Corner, Massachusetts–not exactly a hotbed of fine dining–and only see a few photos from a few restaurants. Yelp, however, has dozens of nearby establishments that have dozens of reviews apiece. (Back home in food-centric San Francisco, Foodspotting is a much richer resource.)

Of course, one of the goals of the new version is to ramp up more quickly. If it works, the app, which was already lots of fun, will be even more fun, and much more useful.

Foodspotting is available for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry; the iPhone and Android editions are the first two to become available in this updated version.

For all that Facebook does to help you organize your online relationships, it doesn’t do much to help you interact with folks in the physical world. Every time you enter a restaurant, conference, or hotel lobby, you’re surrounded by strangers who you might be linked to through mutual friends or shared interests. But it’s hard to know who’s who–and if people you know do happen to be nearby, you might or might not stumble across them.

Enter Highlight, a new iPhone app that aims to tell you about the people in your immediate vicinity. Install it on your phone and connect it to your Facebook account, and it’ll begin alerting you to other Highlight users who are within approximately a block and a half of you. You can pull up profiles with information on them from Facebook and send them text messages (such as “where are you, exactly?”). Founder Paul Davison told me that the app is designed to help you meet new people, refresh your memory about people you’ve met before, and alert you to friends who could be lurking right around the corner.

Is there anything creepy about the prospect of random strangers being able to use an iPhone app to determine who you are? Maybe. But people will only show up in Highlight if they’ve joined the service, which should help allay any privacy concerns. And you can choose to be visible only to other Highlight users who you have friends in common with, so you have at least something in common–and can “pause” the app whenever you just don’t want to be identified.

Highlight reminds me of Sonar, an existing iPhone app built around a similar idea. (I stopped using it because it kept notifying me that my wife was nearby–no, really?–and rarely told me about anyone else.) I got to try Highlight a bit yesterday, before it went live to the general public, and it was hard to gauge its usefulness: with only a hundred people using it at the time, it provided only a partial preview of what the experience might be like once thousands or millions of members sign up. But I like the idea behind the app. And if a lot of people start using it, the serendipitious feeling of making new friends and encountering old ones could become an everyday occurrence.

Highlight is currently available in the iTunes App Store; the service part still seems to be invite-only as I write this, but should open up shortly.

 

Flipboard, by contrast, relies heavily on the links your social-network friends share, and allows you to add sections for feeds from specific sites and services, something which Zite doesn’t allow. It’s just now beginning to add the sort of algorithmic story-selecting technology that’s at the heart of Zite.
 

The single best thing about Flipboard is its amazingly polished, clever user interface. Zite, on the iPad and the iPhone, doesn’t come close. But it does get the job done. On the iPhone, a scrolling list of categories is up top, and a list of articles sits below. As with Flipboard, the iPad and iPhone versions sync up so your customizations show up in both places.
 

It’s good to see Zite on the iPhone. And we might see it in a lot of other places eventually. The company–which is now part of CNN–says its long-term goal is to be available everywhere, including other operating systems and the Web.

When Flipboard debuted for the iPad last year, it got so much attention that the company’s servers buckled under the load and the app didn’t work. And now, it’s deja vu all over again: After arriving in an excellent iPhone version yesterday evening, Flipboard has gone down. I’m getting the above on a freshly-installed copy of the iPhone version; on the iPad, the app is behaving oddly, sometimes going to the wrong section when I swipe.

Outages of this sort are almost a rite of passage for impressive new services. They generally bounce back pretty quickly, which leaves me wondering: If it’s so easy to add adequate capacity after the fact, why does it seem so tough to have it in the first place?

When social-magazine app Flipboard debuted on the iPad in July of last year, it instantly became the closest thing yet to a defining app for Apple’s new program–a beautifully-done program that was beautifully tailored to the platform’s strengths. It was hard to imagine it running on any other device.

Starting now, you don’t need to try and imagine what it might be like elsewhere: Flipboard is arriving on the iPhone. It should be available on the App Store around the time this post goes live.

I got a tour of the new app last week from Mike McCue, the company’s cofounder, and have been using it for the past few days. If you’re a fan of the iPad edition, you’ll be pleased with the iPhone one. And I bet a lot of iPhone owners who are new to Flipboard are going to go gaga for it.

At first blush, the iPhone version looks very much like its older, bigger iPad brother–they both sport among the slickest, most thoughtful interfaces you’ll ever see on a mobile app. The features for finding and adding sections of content–from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks, as well as from news sites, blogs, and other sources–are just about identical in both versions. And everything syncs up, so people who use the app on their phone and tablet have the same sections in both places.

But the Flipboard folks had to rethink many fundamentals to make the program work well on a phone–starting with the very act of flipping “pages” that gives the app its name. On the iPad, you flip horizontally; on the iPhone, you flip vertically, as if you were rifling through the cards in a Rolodex. (McCue told me me that it’s a more natural, comfy action to perform with your thumb.)

On the iPad, Flipboard has enough real estate to reformat Web content in ways that almost always leaves it looking better than it did in the first place–especially in the case of stuff from publishers that Flipboard has partnered with, such as the National Geographic, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic. It does an excellent job on the iPhone, too, but the smaller screen necessitates a simpler, one-column approach that only works in portrait orientation. Occasionally, items that work wonderfully on the iPad are a tad more ungainly on the iPhone–for instance, some National Geographic photo galleries have captions that oveflow onto a second page.

Like before, Flipboard’s presentation of content varies from source to source: Sometimes you get custom-designed pages, sometimes you get ones that have been automatically streamlined (looking a bit like they do in Instapaper), and sometimes you get the original Web version. In that last case, the app is at the mercy of the original site’s designers, and not every site has a version that works well on an iPhone. Mostly, though, reading on Flipboard is very pleasant: It’s certainly an upgrade from Mobile Safari.

(I did find a few instances where stories were misformatted–whether or not this was a Flipboard issue or something awry at the originating site, I couldn’t tell.)

Until now, unlike competitors such as Zite, Flipboard hasn’t used any algorithmic magic to figure out what stories you might like to read. Instead, it’s relied on human beings to pick stuff–including your friends on Facebook and Twitter, editors and others associated with the Web sites whose feeds are available in Flipboard, and a small team at the company itself. The approach has worked well: The articles and other items that show up in Flipboard appeal at least as much to me as ones collected by algorithms in other apps.

But now Flipboard is starting to use computer science to help find stuff, too. Using technology from the Ellerdale Project, a startup that the company acquired last year, it’s given the iPhone app a section called Cover Stories that attempts to pull together a variety of stories based on a deeper analysis of your social connections and your interaction with Flipboard content. The more you read, the smarter it’s supposed to get about its picks.

Based on a few days with the iPhone app, I didn’t notice Cover Stories being radically more fascinating than other sections of Flipboard, but they did contain some worthwhile items. McCue told me that the company plans to beef up the algorithmic technology in future editions–for instance, to use it to cluster related stories–and to add it to the iPad version. (Cover Stories, along with a few other new features such as support for Tumblr accounts, are iPhone-only at the moment.)

The list of apps that Flipboard competes with was already long on the iPad, and the new iPhone version only makes it lengthier. Among the iPhone apps that feel like rivals in one way or another are Float, News 360, Pulse, and Taptu. Flipboard for the iPhone doesn’t render any of them obsolete, in part because most of them emphasize well-organized news content, while Flipboard is willfully eclectic and more deeply tied into your relationships on social networks. In a single Flipboard session, for instance, you might check out some breaking news, read an offbeat feature or two from a site you don’t know, and enjoy a bunch of photos taken by both friends and strangers; that’s what makes it different and delightful.

As on the iPad, however, the new version’s overall polish and ingenuity raises the bar for apps of all kinds–a welcome characteristic it shares with the new version of Path. And now that we know what Flipboard is like on the iPhone, I have a new question to wonder about: What might it look like on other platforms? McCue didn’t have any news in that department. But he told me that it’s a subject the company will be pondering now that the iPhone version is finished.

Most often, Apple waits to release stuff until its exceptionally polished. With Siri, it unveiled something that’s a beta in the classic sense of the word: an unfinished product. I’m glad it did, but the company is catching (rather silly) flak in part because people expect Apple products to just work.

Electronic Arts thinks people will. The publisher is relaunching Tetris for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, with an optional subscription for extra features, Gamasutra reports.

Here’s how it works: For $1, the basic Tetris app includes three game modes and a ranking system that allows people to level up as they play. For $3 per month, or $30 per year, players can join the “T-Club,” which provides performance-enhancing perks, faster rank progression and exclusive content. Yes, EA wants people to subscribe to Tetris.

I don’t like the idea that you can pay your way to a higher rank, because it’s a slap in the face to people who are genuinely really good at Tetris. But EA isn’t the first company to offer this type of perk. Pretty much any game that lets you buy more powerful items is propagating the trend, from casual games like Farmville to supposedly hardcore games like Infinity Blade. It’s obviously working.

The difference here is that EA is looking for recurring payments, as opposed to one-time content purchases. And it just might work.

These days, a lot of games rely on a level up mechanism to be addictive, stringing players along with progress bars just waiting to be filled. But Tetris is already addictive on its own. The addiction can be argued scientifically.

So what we have here is a one-two punch: an addictive game, plus the addictive meta-game in which you level up. EA is selling a performance enhancer for the latter, figuring some people are hooked enough to throw money at it.

Even if most people know better, I can’t imagine this working out poorly for EA. Tetris is a simple game. Any extra content EA provides to subscribers must have a pretty low overhead. If just a fraction of a percent of Tetris buyers sign up, EA probably comes out a winner.

A year ago, a new photo-sharing app for the iPhone called Path debuted. It was slick and fun, but the most noteworthy thing about it was an intentional limitation: It only allowed you to connect with up to fifty other users, the theory being that it was for sharing images with your family and close friends, not the world.

Path did OK, but it didn’t become a big hit–unlike Instagram, which arrived at around the same time.

Now Path is back. The new version, Path 2, isn’t just about photos: You can share your textual status updates, your location, who you’re with, and whether you’re awake or asleep. You can also have the app automatically alert people when you travel a great distance and land in a new place. The original 50-friend limit has been bumped up to 150. And you can now push the items you post out to Facebook and/or Twitter.

The Path people now call the app a smart journal, which is as coherent a way as any to describe what it’s doing.

What Path is doing is interesting. But what interests me most isn’t what it does but how it does it. It’s got one of the best user interfaces I’ve ever seen on a mobile app. For the most part, it’s a cakewalk to learn and use. And it just looks great–it’s both highly refined and fun, and clever without being overly cute.

(Side note: I don’t understand why you can only change and retrieve your Path password at a hard-to-find page on the company’s Web site. It’s an odd exception to the app’s otherwise high standard of usability.)

Path’s look and feel are so good that it instantly makes nearly every other mobile app–and especially Facebook–look a bit tired. Really, the only competition it has in terms of pure imaginative flourishes and pixel-perfect fit-and-finish is Flipboard.

My big reservation about Path involves one of the few things about it that hasn’t changed in this upgrade. It’s still meant for sharing with a small circle of “the ones you love,” not random vague acquaintances and utter strangers. That’s why the 150-person cap is in effect.

Maybe it’s just me, but…

…I’m so excited by Path’s interface that I don’t want to use it to communicate with only 150 best buddies and family members. Many of people I love are unlikely to get on Path anytime soon–some of them don’t own smart phones, or just don’t spend much time on any social network. The folks I like to share stuff with are a largely separate group, and there are more than 150 of them.

The prospect of running up against the limitation is a Sword of Damocles that discourages me from getting too emotionally involved with Path in the first place. And the fact that the limit has already gone from 50 to 150 just shows how artificial it is. Why not 450, or 1250, or 2769? Why can’t every Path user decide for him or herself how widely or narrowly to share? Not allowing us to do so smacks of pointless control-freakishness.

I get that the focus on “the ones you love” helps to differentiate Path from Facebook. But the new version is so very well done that I think it could give Facebook a run for its money, at least when it comes to people who do most of their social networking on their smartphone.

Anyhow, enough grousing. If you like well-done mobile apps and have an iPhone or Android handset, you need to check Path 2 out. Here’s an official video walk-through of its highlights.