Gourmet iPad App

From Dinner's Journal:

The product, available for free at the iPad App Store, offers packets of content—called “rewards”—for viewing certain pages, but only if readers have checked into one of the social-media sites. Those sites are then used to send out alerts naming the content the user has just downloaded. Earlier today, Facebook friends and Twitter followers of Bob Sauerberg, the president of Condé Nast, got the following message: “I just earned a great collection of cocktails by Elayne Duke on Gourmet Live! Find your rewards at http://live.gourmet.com/about”. (Users can opt out of these alerts.)

Uhm, that's not very cool... not at all. Though it's good that you can opt out. Is a business model that tries to get people to be spam bots to their friends going to be a successful one? I certainly hope not... but Farmville would argue otherwise.

On the other hand, I'd like to see Gourmet resurrected, and the iPad is a more viable platform than many.