Creating a social dining experience at Yale
Want to know which dining hall your friends are eating at? There’s an app for that — Huddlr to be specific. A group of Yale students created the social events app in November of 2014, but it wasn’t until last month that the developers decided to pair up with Yale University dining services.
According to a release from Yale Daily News, Huddlr was launched as a Yale-specific, party-networking iPhone application. The partnership with Yale Dining came on January 12 and will enable app users to see where their friends are eating. The locations on the app include all university dining halls along with select retail locations around the New Haven, Connecticut campus.
Huddlr uses the GPS location functionality of a user’s smartphone or tablet to report when they have arrived at a given venue. Users can also add friends to a favorites list via their existing contacts, a manual search or by connecting the app to their existing Facebook accounts. Upon entering a Yale dining hall, Huddlr will notify a user’s selected friends of their location.
In this way, building up a network of Huddlr friends is pivotal to the use of the app. Users can tap on a location icon to see where their friends are eating. And as an added feature, the app also includes messaging and event-creation functions that can be used to coordinate group gatherings.
In addition to adding a social aspect to the university dining experience, the app will also give students the opportunity to provide feedback and data for Yale Dining. Specifically, the app will provide population and flow data for each dining hall — information that Yale Dining can use to better distribute resources.
So far, the application has increased its user population from the members of two fraternities to a few hundred Yale students. The app’s creators say that work is underway to grow the number of locations, with further plans to join with Yale Athletics and additional New Haven restaurants.
