Looking for places you’ll love while you’re out and about? There’s an app for that (there are quite a few actually). We’ve already used Google’s Map App since the iPhone came on the market, and there’s the Google Mobile app that includes access to Google Maps. Now Google Places with ‘Hotpot’ has just arrived in the Apple App Store after being available for Android phones for a while. Apart from helping you discover places near where you are, it gives you the best places to go for you by personalizing your search results based on places you’ve rated already–the more you rate places the more Google can give you personally tailored recommendations based on your tastes and preferences.
Places makes it super simple to rate a place with your iPhone while you’re there. Just fire up the app and hit “Rate now.” It will use your location to guess your current place and let you post a Hotpot review right from your phone. But it’s not just about getting to say what you think—the more you rate places, the more you’re sharing about your tastes and the more personally tailored recommendations it can give you.
So what is Google Hotpot all about? This brings a social element into the mix; add friends to discover their recommendations and share your own. Google announced earlier this week that Hotpot is being added on the Google Maps home page.
Google Places could give existing mobile restaurant review sites such as Yelp! and Urban Spoon a run for their money. Google recently failed in a bid to buy Groupon, but if it snaps up some other coupon style site, expect this to get thrown into the mix too. The Google Places App seems to be a work in progress, and with Facebook’s Mobile Check In and Foursquare having similar features, it means the market for Apps like this is looking a little crowded. If Google eventually brings out a Social Media platform to rival Facebook and all these features are included in one mobile App, then it could really challenge Facebook.
The screen shot above shows how we tested out the App. The GPS co-ordinates were not 100% accurate and most of the business it discovered were bars and restaurants within a few blocks. We did eventually find the SplitMango Places page but we had to enter Vancouver Web Design into the search box. It is important to make sure you have a Google Places page for your business as mobile search is clearly getting more and more important. Talk to us if you need a Google Places page set-up, or for any other social media queries you might have.
Get the Places app on your iPhone now by searching for Google Places in the App Store – it’s free! Check out Google Hotpot from your desktop computer.
