BigOven Blog

Family Mealtime: It Matters.

Why Mealtime Matters

The data is convincing:  sharing meals helps cement family relationships. 

"Sitting down to a meal together draws a line around us," says Miriam Weinstein, author of The Surprising Power of Family Meals. "It encloses us and, for a brief time, strengthens the bonds that connect us with other members of our self-defined clan, shutting out the rest of the world."

Family mealtime does many more things – it provides an opportunity to connect, demonstrate good nutrition and eating habits, table manners, how to handle disputes, strategize social and/or academic issues at school, and stay in touch with each other.

Yet ever-increasing demands on our time have caused this once-universal tradition – the nightly family dinner hour -- to erode. 

In so many households, kids come into the kitchen, grab what they can, and go.  People eat standing up.  We head off, pairwise or individually to get some fuel in our bodies.  We’re eating on the run, in our cars, and it’s on to the next sports practice or meetup. 

It seems like an efficient way to use time – after all, something has to go, right? 

But in study after study, the beneficial impact of family mealtime has been clearly demonstrated for children of all ages. Better grades, healthier eating habits, resistance to drugs or alcohol later in life, closer relationships to parents and siblings, ability to resist negative peer pressure, resilience in the face of life's problems — all these are outcomes of simply sharing dinner on a regular basis.

We encourage you to make it a priority in your lives, even if it means dropping an after-school activity off the list:

• Children depend on their parents for nutrition and health guidance. 71% say they get information about how to be healthy from their mother; 43% from their father.
• 19% of teens who have fewer than three family dinners per week report that there is a great deal of tension or stress between family members, compared to 7% of teens who have at least five family dinners per week.
• More meals at home also resulted in less obesity.
• Because feeding is the most basic animal form of caring, sharing meals is one of the most central family bonds.
• Through the mini lessons of table manners, children learn to share and think of others. By saying “please” and “thank you,” we recognize the humanity of our tablemate, acknowledging the fact that we both deserve respect.
• More than a decade of research by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University has found that the more often kids eat dinner with their families, the less like they are to smoke, drink or use drugs.

Here are some helpful strategies to help increase your chances of eating together as a family 3 times a week or more:

Encouraging Family Meals

1. Recognize the importance of mealtime. Get the family together and discuss the benefits of dining as a group. Talk about research that documents the power of sharing this time together.
2. Identify obstacles to mealtime. Coordinating schedules can be tough, but it can be done. Despite late work hours, after-school activities, and long commutes, many families are still able to make dinnertime a priority.
3. Make a schedule. Set the expectation that family members will gather at specific times during the week for mealtime. These meeting times should be considered as important as soccer practice, hair appointments, club meetings, or other distractions.
4. Make a plan.  BigOven’s Menu Planner can help a great deal in letting you plan ahead for the week, and giving each member of the family “their night” of their favorite dish.
5. Turn off the television and electronic gadgets. People who watch television while eating tend to tune out their natural hunger and satiety cues, which encourages overeating.
6. Serve a variety of foods for a variety of tastes. Avoid meal-time battles by creating menus with something for every member of the family.
7. Make a commitment as a family. Get the whole clan together and promise each other: "We will share mealtime as a family." Live up to that promise and watch your family grow closer and stronger.

Read more:

• The Magic of the Family Meal, Time, June 2006

Source:  “PowerOfFamilyMeals” and “The Surprising Power of Family Meals” by Dr. Miriam Weinstein.

New: Quickly find recent raves related to your recipe search!

This new feature currently applies to: www.bigoven.com and BigOven for Windows

BigOven.com searches are now powered by our new StirFry™ search engine.  “StirFry” is our internal codename for our improved search engine.  For a while now we’ve been working on these improvements, which set the stage for more things to come. 

Our major goals for this release include speed – especially when applying multiple criteria to searches – and better surfacing of user’s comments in the results. 

StirFry now released on BigOven.com

We’ve just pushed the first of those updates to BigOven.com, and you can see the changes with a cool new feature:  see “Raves” related to your search query with a single click.

Example:

Let’s search for spinach recipes.  Simple.  Just visit www.bigoven.com and enter “spinach”. 

By default, you’re doing an “anywhere” search, which means BigOven will look for the term in the Title, Description, Ingredients, Tags, Cuisine, or Username of the recipe.  (We have deliberately removed Instructions from the anywhere search as of this release, because it was cluttering the search results with unrelated answers.  As just one example, if you were searching for “rolls”, you’d see all the recipes that required “rolling out the dough”.)

OK, back to spinach. 

You’ll get 4,700+ recipe results presented to you that look like this:

 

Take a look at the top two links – you can search just in the title, or – well lookee here! -- you can search “recent raves related to spinach”:

 

In BigOven parlance, a “rave” is a rating of 4 or 5 stars.  Click on that, and you’ll see a paged list of all the raves that involved “spinach” in some way, sorted by most recent:

 

You can also use any username in the keyword search, which will show you all the recipes you’ve posted.  (If you have any private recipes, you must be logged in to see them.)

For instance, if your username is “stevemur”, you can see raves related to your recipes as follows – put your username in the “anywhere” box, and check the “Raves” box:

 

Have fun finding great dishes to try, and remember – raves are made much better if we take time to share our detailed comments and tips, so please keep contributing! 

Sorting

By popular request, we’ve also added the ability to sort by pure Star Rating, which is different than our default “Quality” sort order.  Here’s the difference:  "Star Rating” simply looks at the average star rating.  “Quality” is our term for our proprietary recipe scoring algorithm, which takes into account factors like how many reviews a recipe has, how many different people rated a recipe highly, whether a recipe has one or more photos, how many reviews there are, and more.

Put another way, a recipe with a single 5.0 star review will sort higher than a recipe with 25 4 star reviews, 30 comments.  But the latter recipe’s Quality will be much higher, and will sort higher in the Quality sort.

We hope you find these changes useful!

Happy cooking from Seattle

Windows users: How to get your recipes online and on iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone

Every few days, we receive an inquiry to our support desk from BigOven for Windows users that asks how to make recipes that are currently in BigOven for Windows recipe software on a user’s desktop or laptop so that they are viewable in the free iPhone, iPad, Android or Windows Phone apps. 

The answer is that you need to post them to BigOven.com. 

BigOven uses the web to host all recipes – the software does not publish straight to any mobile devices.  That is, you don’t connect a cable and “sync” from your PC to your smartphone, you publish them to BigOven.com publicly or privately, and then use your mobile device to access the online recipes. 

We made this deliberate design choice for a variety of reasons. 

First, people change their devices all the time – moving from iPhone to Android to or Android to Windows Phone, etc.  Doing it this way makes migration effortless for you.  Second, Apple doesn’t provide a very good sync interface for developers to use to write generic data to their devices.  Third, even if we wanted to write device-specific synchronization to currently four different devices (iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone) it would be a huge technical burden keeping up with all the OS changes on each platform related to synchronization, and that would most likely lead to increase costs, end-user pricing and mutual frustration.  Finally, and most important, publishing once to the web allows you to also have your recipes on the web if you’d like without any extra work.

BigOven Imports from other Recipe Software

And, because BigOven for Windows imports MasterCook MX2, MXP, MealMaster MMF and one flavor of the Cook’n format (DBF), you can also join the smartphone revolution and “mobilize” your recipes via BigOven for Windows, letting you access your recipes when you’re at the grocery store or farmer’s market.  Just import ‘em and post ‘em.

Public or Private Posting

Publishing to the web doesn’t mean that your recipes need to be public.

As a PRO member, you get to choose.  You can post recipes from the desktop software publicly or privately. 

• Public recipes are viewable by everyone on any BigOven point of service – that is, BigOven.com or the free mobile recipe apps.
• Private recipes can only be viewed by you, and only when you’re logged in. 

Pro membership is required to post recipes.  As of May 22nd 2011, BigOven for Windows is free, but use of online features (like posting recipes) now requires Pro membership. 

We explained our rationale for this important change six months ago, but also realize this may still be news to several of you.  If you’ve purchased BigOven for Windows in the past, please read this post from May 2011 that explains this important change.

BigOven for Windows Purchasers:  Get a Year of BigOven PRO for free

All BigOven for Windows purchasers are eligible for a free year of BigOven Pro membership – but you need to activate this soon, because this free year offer expires December 30th 2011. 

To activate it, be sure you’ve got version 1.9.1 or later – you can download it here.  Then, browse to any online recipe.  One quick way to do that is to click the “Find” button on the toolbar:

and choose “BigOven.com” as the target for your search, and search for a recipe:

This will bring up a list of recipes in BigOven’s right hand window.  Click on one of the recipes.  You should get a prompt that you need to be a BigOven Pro member.  At the bottom of that login is a link to another page where you can enter your serial number.  Your serial number can be found in the Help > About menu option in BigOven for Windows.

How to Post Recipes in BigOven for Windows

First, find the recipe you’d like to post.  Click on it.  (If the icon already has a globe next to it, it’s already posted.)

Next, choose Post on the toolbar:

You’ll see a dialog that asks you to add 3 tags, categorize it, and star-rate it.  You need to do all these things (making each of the three checkmarks light up) in order to see the Ready to Post button light up:

Then, click submit:

 

You’ll be prompted to categorize it in the archive (so that you and others can find it by browsing through the categories), and also whether you’d like to make the recipe Public or Private.

That’s it!  Your recipe is online.  Now, you can launch your iPhone, iPad, Android or Windows Phone app and bring up “Recipes I’ve Posted”. 

If you’ve already done so, and don’t see the recipe, you may need to refresh the list, which can be done in the iPhone and iPad by tugging down on the list again.  Also, be sure you’re browsing the correct category.

Upload Photos On the Recipe Page or In the App

By design, recipe photos are NOT uploaded as part of the posting process. 

The reason?  We want consumers to be very careful about the photos uploaded, and we highly, highly encourage you to ensure that photos you submit are original, and not taken from any commercial source.  To add a photo to the recipe, simply visit the recipe page on BigOven (or in the mobile apps) and submit a photo.

Bulk Recipe Upload?

While posting each recipe takes only a few seconds, and only needs to be done once, for the time-being at least, you must post recipes one at a time. 

We are evaluating how we might support a bulk-upload feature from the desktop software, and would love some input (you can leave comments right here on the blog). 

From a technical standpoint, bulk upload is fairly straightforward, although one tricky bit is to ensure that bulk uploads that are interrupted partially through don’t somehow create duplicates if re-tried. 

Perhaps our biggest design challenge we have in allowing bulk uploads is the protection of the search experience on BigOven.com for the millions of cooks who have come to use it.  That is, we don’t want people’s search for “chocolate chip cookie” on BigOven.com to show, say, 300,000+ answers, many of which are identical.  If everyone uploads all their recipes in bulk form, that not only increases the likelihood of duplicates, but it also may create performance burdens on search. 

We could certainly make bulk-upload a private-only option, but we also think that those who wish to upload, say, 10,000 recipes and keep them private might need to pay more than just $15.99 per year.  We may instead do a limit of 1,000 recipes for bulk uploads, and mandate that they stay private.  Quite frankly, we’re still mulling this one through, and welcome your input.

You Can Post Grocery Lists, Too

One last thing I should mention, you can post your grocery lists to BigOven as well.  These remain private, visible only to you when you are logged in.  To do so, simply choose “Post Grocery List” from the Tools menu:

170,000+ Recipes for iPad 3.0: Now with Menu Planner

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of our free iPad app -- 170,000+ Recipes BigOven -- now with a beta of Menu Planner.

Menu Planner lets you add recipes and notes to a calendar, then generate a grocery list.  (Pro membership is required to utilize the grocery list; Menu Planner itself is also a Pro feature, but is freely available for all users during the beta testing period.)

Demo Video

 

Other Features

• NEW:  resize recipes -- change the servings and ingredients will be scaled
• Search over 170,000+ recipes
• Use up leftovers -- simply enter up to 3 ingredients from your fridge or pantry
• Share recipes via email, Facebook, Twitter
• Rate/review recipes
• RecipeScan - simply upload photos and we'll do the data entry for you!
• Enter recipes via link from within the app
• Discover all the recipes posted by someone whose cooking you like
• Build a grocery list from recipes (BigOven Pro required)

Get it today - it's free!

Introducing Menu Planner

Plan Ahead.  Put an end the “Dinner Scramble.”  Save Time and Money!

Have you ever gotten to 4 or 5pm and wondered “What are we going to make tonight?” 

What if there were an easy tool to make menu planning a breeze?

BigOven is pleased to introduce Menu Planner, designed by home cooks just like you.  It’s now available in free beta on the web, and coming very soon in the 170,000+ Recipes – BigOven app for the Apple iPad.

With Menu Planner, you simply drag and drop recipes onto a calendar, click to add notes, and easily put them in any order you want. 

Then, when you’re done, click a button and BigOven will create a sorted grocery list automatically for you!  It’s the easiest way to create grocery lists from your favorite recipes.

Watch a Demo

Introducing Menu Planner by BigOven–the easiest way to make cooking plans

 

Simply Drag and Drop!

With Menu Planner, you simply drag recipes from the left and drop them onto the calendar.

You can choose from four different sources of recipes:

• Find a recipe in the archive
• Recipes you’ve marked “Try Soon” (in our mobile apps or website)
• Recipes you’ve marked “Favorite” (in our mobile apps or website)
• Recipes you’ve posted or added via RecipeScan

Any recipe that is online at www.bigoven.com – there are currently over 200,000 of them – can be added to a menu plan. If you’re a BigOven for Windows user, simply post one or more recipes from your desktop software to use the online Menu Planner. Recipes will show up in your “My Posted Recipes” tab on the left hand side.

BigOven’s Menu Planner is designed to be extremely flexible, and work the way you do. You can add free-form text notes anywhere you’d like – they can be events, notes about company visiting, or even easy side dishes to accompany your meal.

You can email a plan to others, simply by clicking the “Send” button in the upper right corner of the screen.

When you’re ready to create a grocery list, simply click this button:

… and BigOven will convert any date range on your calendar into a grocery list! Better yet, the grocery list is automatically sorted by aisle for you, eliminating back-tracking through the grocery store.

 

 

 

 

 

Add a Recipe from any recipe page

You can also add a recipe to your Menu Plan from any recipe detail page.  Just click “Add to Menu Plan” on the right hand side, and you’ll see a popup dialog asking you when you’d like to make it, and for which meal.

Now in Free Beta for All Users

Menu Planner is a feature of BigOven PRO membership.  BigOven Pro brings you the ability to post private recipes, generate a grocery list, an advertising-free experience, and detailed nutrition facts. 

During our beta period, we are opening Menu Planner to all users, free of charge.  Once our free beta period ends, you’ll need to be a BigOven Pro member to use it ($15.99/year). 

Importantly, even during our free beta period, BigOven Pro membership is required to generate grocery lists; you can watch a demo of the process above.  A no-risk free 30-day trial of BigOven pro is available at www.bigoven.com/pro. 

Why Plan Ahead?

Making a menu plan helps you get organized. 

• Planning ahead reduces the number of shopping trips you make
• Planning ahead makes them more efficient
• Planning ahead helps you eat better
• Planning ahead can help ease the holiday stress
• Planning ahead can dramatically reduce the amount of food you throw away
• Planning ahead can help you utilize coupons or other specials at your store

Tips

• Simply click the “create grocery list” button to get a grocery list created for you
• Click on a meal name (breakfast, lunch, dinner) to add notes
• You make make copies of entire days, weeks or months that are on your plan. Simply hover over a date, and you’ll see a tiny calendar icon pop up. Click on that icon, and it’ll let you “copy into” that day from any other date range on your calendar. (Want to get unstuck? Simply define a few common week plans, then make copies of those to fill out your year!)

Give it a try – it’s free!

To get started, just visit www.bigoven.com/plan.  If you’re not yet a BigOven Pro member, try our free 30-day trial at www.bigoven.com/pro to create grocery lists, post private recipes, and enjoy an ad-free experience.

Comments?

BigOven is a brought to you by a team of home cooks and developers that are are passionate about getting your organized and inspired in the kitchen.  Got comments or suggestions?  We’d love to hear them.  Jot us a comment right here on this blog, reach our development team directly at www.bigoven.com/site/comments, or join us on our Facebook group.  Happy cooking!

RecipeScan makes it easy: upload photos and we will do the data entry!

Earlier this year, BigOven introduced RecipeScan™, a revolutionary and simple way for you to get your paper and handwritten recipes into the digital world, and ready for easy grocery shopping and menu planning. 

Demo Video

What’s RecipeScan?  In case you missed it, a short demo video is below:

RecipeScan by BigOven–Get your cooking organized!

 

We’ve processed many thousands of RecipeScan requests so far, and we’ve gotten some terrific feedback from home cooks like you.  We’ve also seen areas that needed improvement, and are announcing several such improvements today.

What’s new?  Improvements

• We’ve tightened up our quality control pass after data entry is completed.  Your RecipeScan may take a little longer to complete (still within the 5 business day window), but you’re going to enjoy even more accuracy.
• There are now complete quality passes before transcription occurs, during the process and after the process is complete. 
• RecipeScan is available natively from each of our smartphone apps – Android, iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone.  You can also submit JPGs or scans directly at www.bigoven.com/recipe/scan
• The recipe details page on BigOven.com now shows you the original image or images that you submitted.   See the sample below – just click on the image to view the original submission.

 

 

• Bug fix:  We had a few sporadic reports of transposed requests – i.e., a few users received a recipe back from the process that wasn’t the one submitted.  We want you to know that we have found and fixed the bug that was causing that, and have fully refunded related credits – we’re very sorry!  We believe we’ve handled each of these via support@bigoven.com but if you’re one of those, please try again, or contact us at support@bigoven.com if we can help in any way.  Thanks!
• It’s now easy to find the recipes you’ve RecipeScanned:  Just visit www.bigoven.com and click Recipes.  You’ll see a “Recipes I’ve Posted” link.  Click on that, and on the left hand side, limit the filter to recipes “I’ve RecipeScanned”: 

 

Tips

• You can find your recipes by entering the title and your username in “keyword” search.  For instance, the recipe above can be found by stevemur when logged in just by searching “tuna stevemur”.  In the smartphone apps, be sure you are in “Keyword” search, not title search.  And remember, RecipeScans are private by default – you won’t see them unless you are logged in.
• Editing is simple!  You can make edits to any RecipeScanned or posted recipe on www.bigoven.com – just make sure you’re logged in, find the recipe, and click the “Edit” button on the right hand side of the page.
• RecipeScan works with handwritten or typed recipes. 
• Make sure they are well-lit, in focus, and legible!  Also, make sure they have a title – just scribble one on the sheet before you snap a photo.
• Is your recipe more than one page?  Don’t submit it via the mobile apps – those can only process one image per recipe.  Instead, simply submit your RecipeScan request via our web form at www.bigoven.com/recipe/scan – that can handle up to 3 images per recipe. 

 

Comparison with other tools

A few people have written in asking how this is different than what digital document managers like Evernote or Google Docs does.  First, we should point out that while we think these are fantastic tools for generic digital document management, for recipes, we think these tools fall well-short of what BigOven delivers. 

To generic document management tools, your recipe is simply unstructured text, just like any other newspaper article or sequence of words.  As such, it won’t let you do many things that BigOven does natively:

• Search by ingredients including or NOT including, category (dessert, main dish), other searches  – online or from the free smartphone apps
• Add the recipe along with others to a grocery list
• Automatically sort that grocery list by aisle
• Add the recipe to a calendar (Hmm.  more on this shortly)
• Scale the recipe up or down
• Get nutrition facts automatically generated
• Automatically convert to metric or US
• Automatically parse the recipe into Title, Instructions, Ingredients, etc. which allows all of this
• Add to a list of Try Soons, Favorites
• Add to Facebook Timeline as what you’re cooking, or share them easily with others in the community
• … and more

In a nutshell, because BigOven knows it’s a recipe, you can do much more with it in the kitchen, and on the go.

Give RecipeScan a try!   Visit www.bigoven.com/recipe/scan to learn more, and click “Like” below to share this cool new way to get organized with your cooking friends this holiday season!

BigOven Grocery Lists Gets Smarter: Better Categorization

Much has been written over the past five years about the “wisdom of the crowds”. 

One of the benefits of social applications like BigOven is that under the right circumstances, groups can be highly intelligent, and group decisions can be used to help individuals.

One small instance where we’ve taken this approach is the BigOven Grocery List, available on the web and in our free mobile apps (BigOven Pro Membership required)  which, among other things, automatically groups items by aisle. 

What’s Automatic Categorization?

We deliberately design our recipe and grocery item entry forms to not constrain you in any way in the text you write. One person’s “scallions” is another person’s “green onions”.

When you type in “Avocados”, BigOven knows that “Avocados” can be found in a grocery store’s “Produce” (fruits/vegetables) section.  When you type in “Maple Syrup”, BigOven knows that’s typically grouped with “Condiments”.  

Applied to the list as a whole, this one feature alone can save 20-30 minutes on each grocery run.  As anyone who has gotten a scattershot grocery list knows, backtracking through the grocery store (or repeatedly scanning your full list at every stop) is very time-consuming, and this one feature eliminates it.  Put another way, by using BigOven – either the smartphone app or even a printout – you know that when you’re done with an aisle, you’re really done with the aisle.

Here’s where we get to what’s new.

New Today: Employing the Wisdom of the Crowds to Make Categorization Smarter

In the past, BigOven used to solely have a master list of 1,000 or so known, common ingredient items that were pattern-matched to what you typed in.  We’d add to this list (and still do) when we wanted to “train” BigOven.  So BigOven would know that “Maple Syrup” belongs in the Condiments section, because we had specifically trained BigOven to put “Maple Syrup” there.

But BigOven is growing in size, and YOU are helping it get smarter, every time you categorize something in the grocery list.

While the number is changing all the time, there are currently close to one million active grocery line items in the BigOven “cloud” today.  So, earlier today, we linked together the collective wisdom of what’s on people’s shopping lists and how people are categorizing them -- and we use this information to better “train” BigOven on how to categorize the new items you’re adding to your list. 

So, if 18,000 people know that something called “Special K” can be found in “Cereals”, BigOven knows that for you, too.  If 800 people know that “Frosted Flakes” belongs in “Cereals”, BigOven will know that for you too, even if we here in Seattle didn’t do anything to train it to know that.

This improvement starts today in our web based and smartphone grocery lists when you add new items.  Your grocery list is always available at www.bigoven.com/grocery and our free smartphone and iPad apps.

 

Not yet a PRO member?  Try Grocery Lists Today - Save Time, and Never Forget Ingredients Again

Grocery lists are a feature of BigOven Pro, and they synchronize across our free mobile apps.  You can create grocery lists from recipes, add or remove individual ingredients or entire recipes at a time, print and email them.  If you’re spending too much time building the weekly grocery list, be sure to check out the free trial of BigOven Pro at www.bigoven.com/pro. 

 

BigOven links to Facebook Timeline

Quickly and optionally share what you’re cooking with your Facebook friends, and remind yourself what you made over time!

 

What’s Facebook “Timeline”?

Timeline is a dramatically enhanced profile page that Facebook just announced.  Timeline will be appearing on Facebook very soon for all user accounts. 

We think Timeline is pretty remarkable.  It lets you scroll back in time, see photos you’ve submitted, status updates you’ve shared, friends you’ve made and more, all organized by date for you.   What’s more, it highlights serendipity, such as two of your friends making the same thing for dinner.

You can read more about Facebook’s new Timeline, and see a demonstration here:  “Introducing Timeline” straight from Facebook themselves.

 

NEW:  Link BigOven to Timeline to add what you’re cooking, and share ideas with friends!

You can now add to your Timeline simply by clicking “Add to Timeline” in the upper right corner of any recipe page on www.bigoven.com.  You’ll get a prompt (once and only once) asking you to permit BigOven to post events to your Timeline.  At present, the only event that we’re posting to your timeline is when you click “Add to Timeline”, but in the future, we are very likely to add events such as when you rate a recipe or post a public recipe or photo.  We’re always looking for feedback on these ideas, so let us know!

Example

Tonight, I’m making Chicken a La King.  (I really am; this isn’t just a demo.  Autumn has arrived in Seattle!)  So, on BigOven, I’m simply going to click this link, highlighted in yellow.

 

NOTE:  At this writing, Oct-4-2011 -- If you don’t yet have Timeline enabled yet for your account, you will see an error from Facebook.

This error message will go away as soon as Facebook rolls out Timeline to all users, which is expected very soon.  If you’d like to enable Timeline sooner, the website Mashable has a tutorial here: http://mashable.com/2011/09/22/how-to-facebook-timeline/  

 

That’s it!  It’s on my Facebook Timeline!

On my Timeline, it looks like this:

 

 

Benefits

1. I’ll be able to see a list of everything I’ve cooked, right on Facebook.
2. I can share cooking ideas with my friends
3. I can get cooking ideas from my friends
4. If you are Facebook friends with someone cooking the same recipe, you’ll see that instantly
5. You help spread the word about BigOven, which helps us deliver more great cooking tips, recipes and features for you!

We think it’s cool and useful.  But it’s optional!

Linking BigOven to Facebook’s Timeline is entirely optional.  If you don’t want to share what you’re making for whatever reason, don’t link the two sites.  In no way does BigOven ever see your Facebook login information, nor will we ever.  The technology that allows this does not require any kind of knowledge on BigOven’s part about what your login is.   Read more about BigOven’s common-sense privacy policy.

 

We’re proud to be one of the first social cooking apps to integrate Facebook Timeline.  We hope many of you will find it as fun and as useful as we do.

Happy cooking!