im not saying its practical, im saying its ideal.

the world standardized around http/smtp. I dont think a standardized restaurant-menu-trust-loyality-payment chain is impossible. Look how long it took email to take off (and then got replaced by facebook.)

Its much more likely for a yelp/foursquare to gobble up the market, but I'd prefer a decentralized protocol for distributing menus...

And to criticize your criticism, standard menu metadata + loyality + reviews is not a complicated process, its just not an angle thats really been attacked before. I dont know of a menu database that is intended to feed third party clients like yelp/foursquare/allmenus. All the menu hosts want to be the end user client. My idea is more about separating the database from the client, and sharing a database between a couple companies. For something like this to happen, all you would need is yelp and foursquare (tripadvisor, opentable, zagat, urbanspoon, zomato) to create a consortium and invite a couple other big players. Its not about the restaurants self organizing.