Facebook has launched a competitor to Foursquare and Yelp, in the form of Facebook Places. It takes data from check-ins across the social network to give you recommendations for “great places” to visit in any city.
Visit Facebook.com/places to search for any town or city, and see the top rated and most popular bars, restaurants, arts & entertainment and more. The tool uses user ratings, comments from your friends and others who post ‘in public’, along with the Graph Search.
As a traveling tool, it’s not as developed as Yelp or Foursquare yet. You can’t use it to search for restaurants and so on, just to see what is most popular. That may be a start, but it means you can’t find that ‘cute secret place’ no one knows about. The way it works also means that you tend to see photos of people rather than the places, as many people check in with photos of their friends rather than the place itself.
It has to be said, if you look for a city you know well, you won’t find anything useful in Facebook Places at the moment. You’ll get the most obvious places, which only takes you so far.
Check out Facebook Places here.
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