14 DAY TRIAL // Google keeps expanding Hotpot, its social, local recommendations service. Friends are at the core of the experience and Google is determined to get a social product right for once, so most recent changes center around this aspect.
The latest small addition, the possibility to see all the recommendations from one friends related to a particular search should come in handy if you trust someone's opinion over others in a particular field.
"Most of us know lots of friends, each with very different areas of expertise when it comes to places to recommend. With the recent launch of Hotpot, we made it easy for you to see your friends’ ratings and reviews listed right inside search results," Google Hotpot Engineer Daniel Yehuda writes.
"While this is really helpful, and we’ve had a lot of fun with it, we often found ourselves wanting to see all recommendations by a particular friend for a particular search. Problem solved, thanks to a simple new feature we cooked up," he continues.
A regular search returns recommendations and reviews from all of your friends for the type of place you're looking for. But it's only one recommendation per friend and you may care more about the opinion of just one friends.
Now, clicking on their name will return a list of recommendations for your search from that friend alone. There are plenty of cases when this would prove useful.
By itself, the feature is not very big, but the fast rate of updates indicates that Hotpot is very important to Google at the moment, as it should be. Google is in a great position in the local web services space, Google Maps is as popular as ever.
But it needs to expand to cover the emerging market for hyper-local products that help users find places near their homes or their current location. Google Places provides a huge database of bars, hotels, restaurants and all manner other businesses or places of interest, but it's not very social.
Adding a social component only makes the recommendations more useful and Hotpot has the potential to be very successful, if the right mix of features is reached. For now though, it still has plenty of growing to do.