Hands On With Facebook Nearby, A New Local Biz Discovery Feature That Challenges Yelp And Foursquare
Each month 250 million Facebook users tag posts with location. Today that data goes to work for you in a major revamp of Facebook's Nearby feature for its iOS and Android apps.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook had already used proximity for people discovery in June through its Find Friends Nearby feature. Nearby’s expansion into businesses applies the same location-oriented behavior to a different mobile use case.
The move also arrives as Facebook is emphasizing native iOS and Android apps and reporting one billion users worldwide in 2012. That scale makes location-tagged posts a potentially meaningful input to local discovery rather than merely a social feature.
First-order effects
- Facebook’s iOS and Android users gain a business-discovery surface built from location-tagged posts, while Yelp and Foursquare face a new challenge inside an app users already use socially.
- Local businesses associated with location-tagged Facebook activity can be surfaced through Nearby without users first opening a dedicated local-search app.
Second-order effects
- Yelp and Foursquare must differentiate their local-discovery experiences against Facebook’s combination of social activity and mobile distribution, rather than competing only for standalone destination use.
- Facebook gains a reason to collect and organize more location-tagged activity, tying mobile engagement more closely to place discovery.
Third-order effects
- If users treat social location signals as useful recommendations, local search shifts toward platforms that control both the social graph and the underlying activity stream, pressuring specialist discovery services.
- The boundary between social sharing and local-commerce discovery narrows as the same posts become both communication and a searchable place signal.
The trend: Mobile platforms are turning user-generated location activity into local-discovery products that compete with standalone review and check-in services.