Everplaces gets into the social location recommendations API game with a new, curated Explore section

Location recommendations service Everplaces has today announced the launch of an API to supply travel companies with curated, user-generated local insights. Additionally, it’s taking steps to highlight the best contributions from its community by way of new ‘expert’ recommendations.

The API has initially been trialled in Barcelona, where holiday apartment site Migoa switched from using Foursquare data to Everplaces due to the more curated and targeted nature of the recommendations for restaurants, shops and attractions that it offers.

Everplaces first focused on allowing users to save private ‘bookmarks’ of places they want to remember for the future, but has gradually evolved into a more social service, initially via a social discovery feature and then by expanding out to offer the ability for individuals and business to create their own mini-guides.

Now the new expert recommendations pull up what should be the most interesting and relevant recommendations and display them in a new ‘Explore’ section of the service. CEO and co-founder Tine Thygesen says that these recommendations are selected both “algorithmically and semi-manually” analyzing the quality of the post (does it include an  images and address, for example) and the user (contribution levels, popularity of recommendations etc.). The top-scoring 5 percent are then passed to a human to pick the best to include in the Explore feed.

It’s this feed that will be offered up to third parties via the API. Everplaces faces established competition in this arena from the likes of Yelp and Foursquare, but while it may still be small in comparison to its rivals, it’s the quality of results that will be key to determining how popular the API becomes.

Travel-related businesses interested in adopting the Everplaces API can contact the company for more information.

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