Spotlist Is More Fun With Friends

The best use of Spotlist I've found is planning a dinner with friends.

A few friends, a shared list, everyone throwing in their current favorites—then comparing notes to figure out where we're actually going on Friday. That's how I've been using the collaborative lists we just shipped, and it's genuinely the most fun I've had using the app.

Collabs let you build a list with other people in real time. Each person adds their spots, you can see who contributed what, and suddenly a list has community—it's not just a collection of restaurants, it's a conversation. We built it because Spotlist has always been about tapping into the knowledge of people whose taste you trust. Collabs make that stronger.

We also added @ mentions. When you check in somewhere or add a note to a spot, you can tag a friend directly and they'll get notified. It's a small thing, but it changes the feeling of the app. You're not just maintaining a list—you're recognizing people through it.

The collaborative features are the headline, but a lot of what we shipped is the quieter stuff—the kind of attention to detail that makes an app more useful and enjoyable over time.

Cuisine matching is meaningfully better. We were miscategorizing places—restaurants showing up as bars—and it was creating noise. That's fixed. The categories are more reliable now, which matters more than it sounds because the whole point of Spotlist is that the signal stays clean.

We added a Visited list. Every place you've ever checked into lives there automatically. No setup required. It turns out this is really useful for building lists retroactively—you can look back at everything you've been to and start organizing from there rather than starting from scratch.

The nearby map now shows curator avatars on each pin, so you can see whose recommendation a spot is at a glance.

And there's a new way to explore from within any spot. If you're looking at a restaurant and want to know what else Spotlist users have saved nearby—somewhere to grab a drink before, a place for dessert after—there's now a list of spots in the surrounding area right there on the page. You don't have to go looking. The neighborhood comes to you.

One more thing: I'm Hangry. It's exactly what it sounds like—an automated picker that chooses a restaurant from your lists when you're too hungry to think. Pair it with a collaborative list and you've solved Friday dinner entirely. Add the spots, let Hangry decide, go eat.

I'd love to hear how collaborative lists are working for you, and what you think of the updates. We're never done making Spotlist better. The goal is simple: the most trusted place on the internet to track and share the restaurants you love.