Urbanspoon is a free iPhone application aimed at the indecisiveness gripping a certain subset of young moneyed urban dwellers. Sometimes it is really hard deciding between dinner at Pastis, Spice Market or Buddha Bar! So with a shake, your iPhone becomes a cross between a Magic 8 Ball and a slot machine that uses GPS technology to land on a nearby restaurant, categorized by price, proximity and cuisine. But the app was not so killer for the Times’s Frank Bruni, who recently cruised around town testing it:

I was standing smack in front of Dressler [in Williamsburg], using the phone’s Urbanspoon restaurant-search application, which was supposed to pinpoint my location and recommend the best options nearby. I shook the iPhone… It directed me to a wine bar several blocks away. I shook again. It directed me to an Italian restaurant all the way over the Williamsburg Bridge, in the East Village.

With another shake, a Williamsburg coffeehouse came up, and with yet another shake it was back to the East Village. Even when I specified “Williamsburg” as my preferred neighborhood and “American” as my preferred cuisine, Dressler didn’t come up right away. It was a laggard, an afterthought, and thus revealed the foibles and limitations of the Internet dining guides to which more and more of us are turning for help.