Facebook wants to ensure that its application can do more than just being a medium for browsing your feed. The company has been introducing a slew of features to that end — including one for finding hotspots around you. It is now introducing a brand new feature that will allow users to see a list of cities visited by your friends. The feature also show you recommendations associated with the places you want to go to and things you want to do.
So here is how it works: Facebook is rolling out a feature called City Guides to iOS. The feature is located in Explore (which is where Facebook is storing everything new now a days) and stores a list of cities visited by their buddies recently. The feature also presents users with recommendations on places they should visit, hotels they could stay in and so on.
You can also tap on a city and get a list of friends that have visited it in the past. That should give you something to stand on all its own since you can then call them up and put your questions to them. However, if you want to keep your trip a secret, or would rather look for recommendations from elsewhere, City Guides has you covered. Using the feature, you can check out all the places your friends have checked in while they were visiting. You can also ask them for their opinions within the City Guides feature itself.
Also available is a list called Places the locals go. Pretty much self explanatory, this lists all the places that are frequented by the denizens of city you are planning to go visit. Facebook can do this courtesy of the fact that almost all popular locations now have their own pages and ratings on Facebook.
The feature can also help you plan you trip around an upcoming event in the city, even if you are not aware of the event as of yet. And, you can also hook up with people you may know that are visiting the same event. You can directly get into the City Guides sections the nest time you see a city check in post from friends or family as well.
It is actually very interesting, the way Facebook is able to leverage crowd-sourced data to come up with new, innovative features like this. Interestingly, it also sets it up for competing against the likes of Foursquare, which also launched a very interesting API for developers recently.
The feature is currently available for a small group of iOS users. Knowing Facebook though, it is only a matter of time before it rolls it out globally.
