Facebook Launches Instant Personalization On TripAdvisor
Hot on the heels of bringing Instant Personalization to Clicker last week, today Facebook is announcing the latest addition to the program: TripAdvisor. The popular travel site, which includes user reviews of hotels, restaurants …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook is rolling Instant Personalization out vertical by vertical: Clicker got it the week prior, and TripAdvisor now becomes the travel entry point, surfacing friends' reviews of hotels and restaurants without users logging in. The program has carried known baggage since September, when coverage flagged the privacy exposure of sharing Facebook data with partner sites by default.
The timing fits a broader December push in which Facebook is turning its pages into shopping outlets powered by friend recommendations, and follows years of travel experiments inside the network itself, dating back to the 2007 wave of travel maps and Facebook travel apps.
First-order effects
- TripAdvisor visitors who are logged into Facebook get friend-annotated reviews immediately, while the September warnings about Instant Personalization's default data sharing apply to a much larger travel audience overnight.
Second-order effects
- Other travel and local-review players face pressure to strike similar Facebook data deals or watch a competitor personalize for free, just as Facebook's own Foursquare-style location ambitions reported back in August put it adjacent to check-in services.
Third-order effects
- If the Clicker-to-TripAdvisor cadence continues, Facebook's social graph becomes a licensed personalization layer across major consumer web categories, with opt-out mechanics rather than opt-in consent setting the privacy norm partners inherit.
The trend: Facebook is extending its social graph off its own site by licensing friend data to partner sites one vertical at a time.