NEW YORK: With Facebook’s latest recommendations feature, users may have to see their friends’ vacation photos, whether they like it or not.
The social network announced a new feature for its mobile app that uses phone’s location services to surface more information about the places users visit. Called Place Tips, the feature draws on posts created from a place’s page and from user’s friends. Now when users visit a location their friends have been before, Facebook will bring up their related posts and photos.
Place Tips is optional, and will appear only if users have given Facebook permission to access their location. The company will start testing Place Tips in the New York City area, using cell networks, Wi-Fi and GPS to determine user’s location. The network won’t share user’s location publicly, according to the company. For now, the feature is only available for iPhone users.
It’s another stab at building recommendations into social-media experience, and a deeper dive into a market currently dominated by Yelp, and to a lesser extent, Foursquare. Facebook wants to make sure users keep coming back to its mobile app. Adding contextual, and personalized, location information is another way to hook users.
