Take one part Facebook, one part Yelp, and one part TripAdvisor. Stir in some Wikipedia, and add a dash of Twitter. You might end up with something a little like Lunch.com, which is debuting today at the Web 2.0 Expo show in San Francisco. It’s still in private beta, but the Lunch folks have offered to provide a limited number of invites to Technologizer readers. To get signed up, go to Lunch.com. In the Sign Up box on the right, click on the Click here next to Have an invite code? Then enter Technologizer as the invite code and your e-mail address–you’ll get an e-mail explaining how to take it from there,

So what is Lunch, other than a site with a funny name? It’s hard to sum up concisely, but basically, it’s a social network whose key features are the ability to review anything–anything–and to find other people who Lunch thinks share your taste in stuff. At the moment, my Lunch feed is showing reviews of Twitter, Shih-Tzus (“the best dogs ever”), a karaoke microphone for iPods, Lost, and a particlar type of skirt.

You can also create “data points,” which are simple database entries for items of all sorts–just enough information to get Lunch started on a topic. And every data point has an accompanying wiki about the topic at hand. (In a world that has Wikipeda, Lunch’s wikis feel potentially redundant–actually, the first one I checked out, on San Francisco, appeared to be a slightly rewritten version of the first couple of paragraphs of Wikipedia’s San Francisco entry.)

Lunch gives every user a personal page that looks a bit like a Facebook page–but it’s centered mostly around the reviews that person has written:

And it also involves the concept of a “Similarity Network”–a list of folks who you share tastes with, based on preferences you’ve expressed for various items while using Lunch:

The site also has a feature called ExhiliRATE that lets you rate items in batches, the better to quickly build up data for it to match with the preferences of others:

Lunch is one of the more ambitious and original attempts I’ve seen to launch a new social network: If it reaches a critical mass of dedicated users who express enough opinions on a wide enough range of items, it could be a cool way to find both opinions and kindred spirits. And I like the way that it encourages you to rate things and snippets of information on the fly as you use the site–it’s fun to use.

The site in its current form is very much a beta. For one thing, it feels cluttered with features and (sometimes cryptic) icons, and it’s not always clear what’s going on–I couldn’t tell if the similarity ratings in the screenshot above referred to me or to the person whose profile they appeared in). I also found more off-the-cuff opinions than the sort of trustworthy reviews that would make Lunch an essential resource.

I’m also still figuring out whether Lunch’s far-flung scope–there’s nothing it doesn’t cover–is a virtue (which it can be, if it becomes comprehensive) or a limitation (which it might be, if it’s so random that it doesn’t turn into a solid, focused source of information on any one particular topic).

Then again, Lunch is so new that it’s still getting started with content of any sort–it’s premature to judge how useful it might be once it leaves private beta and has some time to fill up with members and info. (I’ll bet even Wikipedia wasn’t all that impressive on the day it was announced to the public.)

In any event, it’s worth checking out–and if you give it a try, let us know what you think.

 
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