Recipefy: The social network that lets foodies find and share recipes

Yumalicious is all about showing off photos of your culinary creations. Foodspotting is all about sharing photos of dishes you’ve enjoyed, when out and about. And Recipefy is a new social network for cooks which is less about the pictures and more about the recipes themselves.

Recipefy can be used to store your own personal recipes, or collect recipes that you’ve found online and want to put them all in one place. If you’re using it for the latter, you will have to take the time to type, or copy and paste, all of the details yourself.

When adding a new recipe to the site, details you have to complete include ingredients, servings, directions, prep time, cook time, tags and a cover photo. If you really want to get creative with your listings, you can also add step-by-step instructions in photos or as a video. If you’re adding someone else’s recipe, you can add a link to the source as well.

Of course, Recipefy is a social network as well which means that you can follow other users, comment on their recipes and add them to your favourites. Your friends’ recipes will show up under the News tab. You can also browse recipes by user locations, although if we had a choice, it might make more sense to browse by where the recipe itself is from, rather than the cook.

Recipefy already has almost 2,000 recipes in its database, categorized under appetizers, starters, main courses, desserts, and drinks. While other well established sites like Epicurious do have a social network aspect to them, Recipefy sets itself apart by being built entirely on crowdsourcing.

If you would rather not use Recipefy as a social network, you can simply add recipes to your cookbook, set them to private, and make it your own private collection of recipes you can access anywhere in the world.

Recipefy’s design is clean and easy to navigate, although the design does lean ever so slightly to the left of juvenile, possibly mostly due to the choice of font, but we can overlook that for the great features the platform offers.

Recipefy’s social network aspect could work very well for helping out beginner cooks who need to ask for advice or tips, going beyond just following a recipe that was shared by someone else.

All that seems to be missing at this point is an iPad app that really makes it easy to take your recipes with you, wherever you are. That said, the site is entirely accessible using the iPad’s browser.

With Google+ cranking the social network war up a notch or two yesterday, niche social networks like Recepify are still bound to thrive, because not only do they offer social interaction with like-minded people, they also go that little further beyond being just a social network, and become a very handy tool too.

Have you tried out Recipefy? Let us know what you think in the comments.