14 DAY TRIAL // Google is all about social these days, at least that's what the freshly minted CEO Larry Page is trying to do. And it seems to be working, in the sense that more and more Google products are bolting on social features. If this is the right approach or if users will actually want these new features remains to be seen.
As part of this new strategy, Google Places, aka the former Google Hotpot, gets a new profile page, the possibility of adding a photo of the places you rate and a tweak to the default search in the Hotpot app.
A few days ago, Google announced that Hotpot, its relatively new social recommendations app, will be folded into the existing Places. The app doesn't get to keep its name, though the URL is the same, but other than that it works exactly the same.
Google is calling it a graduation and, in a sense it is, Hotpot had been in testing only in several locations so far, though the automated part of worked worldwide, as long as there was Places data.
"We’ve decided to graduate Hotpot to be a permanent part of our core local product offering, Google Places. Rolling Hotpot into Google Places helps simplify the connection between the places that are rated and reviewed and the more than 50 million places that already have an online presence," Lior Ron, Google Hotpot Product Manager, wrote several days ago.
Now, Places/Hotpot is getting an update. The profile pages of your Places friends now show all of their ratings and reviews. The number of "Best Evers" is also displayed as well as an interesting graph showing the ratings most commonly chosen by the user.
Another useful addition is the possibility of uploading your own photos for places that don't have one yet. Uploading photos was already possible on Place Pages, but now you can do it from the Hotpot app as well.
Finally, the default search in Hotpot has been changed to restaurants in your location since Google determined that these ratings proved to be the most popular.