investiledysfunction

I’d previously written and complimented Domino’s Pizza Tracker in a post entitled “Innovative Pizza Technology“.  While skeptical at first, I did find the Pizza Tracker to be a pretty useful little technology.

For the exact opposite in pizza technology, we have Papa John’s Order Online Widget which they’ve created for Facebook.  This technology marvel has 34 users so far.  As Caroline Waxler points out in her Nov 2008 Fast Company article entitled Social Misfits, the widget “lets customer place their order upto 21 days in advance of their preferred delivery date or pickup date and time.”  She goes onto to appropriately state this functionality is great if you just sit back and “Remember that time you got a pizza craving for two weeks from next Tuesday @ 7pm and couldn’t act on it?”

Building a Facebook, iPhone app or using Twitter doesn’t make you current or cool if you’re not doing anything to actually help you enhance your brand and ultimately sell more stuff.  These attempts are just as misguided as the me too social networks which were cropping up regularly but which the current market malaise seems to have squashed a bit.  Technology for technology’s sake, no matter how cool, is a bad investment.  These gizmos must help people actually do something they want to or might be interested in doing and ideally help them do it better.

Here’s the Papa John’s widget.  I’m going to get going now and order a pizza for Nov 23rd now.

My wife and I just ordered Dominos for the first time in a long time.  Blame it on laziness and a desire to eat empty unhealthy calories occasionally.  In true New Yorker fashion, we’ve also chosen to have our pizza delivered even though it would only take 5 minutes to walk and get it.

To take things even easier, Dominos now lets you order online.  This removes the need to call and wait on the phone.  It also lets me basically continue to work as the process is pretty easy.

After ordering, the pizza technology and innovation go a bit crazy with Dominos Pizza Tracker.  As the name implies, this lets you track your pizza.  When I first saw this, I thought, this is ridiculous.  But the Tracker is strangely compelling.  I like to know that Lorenzo started making my pizza at 859pm and when it goes out the door so I know when it is likely reach me.  This lets me plan my time better (I can do errands, make some phone calls, etc).  The pizza tracker just made delivery a bit more convenient if that was even possible.  Nice job Dominos on the innovation front and your use of technology to make your customers lives easier.

One note of caution - please don’t start a social network for pizza lovers and screw things up now.