Planner Reads

GraffitiGeo is the latest company to offer an iPhone application that gives you a quick way to see and rate restaurants — but it provides the added simplicity of letting you merely point your phone at the physical location.

The application is pending approval by Apple’s app store (and to be clear, this will be the company’s second application; its existing app is meant to be a sort of Twitter-based Digg for restaurant ratings.)

Here’s a YouTube review of what the pending application looks like. You’ll see it shows reviews of restaurants layered over the screen of your iPhone when you’re standing in front of a restaurant and pointing your iPhone at it. You can pan your iPhone down the street and see other reviews.

That far, it’s great. Except then it goes on to try to do too much. The company is throwing in just about everything: It has a “mob” component, where friends can gang together to earn street cred points (mainly by commenting on locations) and take over territories. You can tag a comment to a particular restaurant by tweeting with a hash ...