Foursquare on Wednesday announced it has expanded recommendations to include suggestions from your Facebook friends. If you link the two services together, you’ll see the difference immediately when you search for something on Foursquare.com, as well as via the service’s Android and iPhone apps.
So, what great things will you see on Foursquare from your Facebook friends? Essentially, any public recommendation that Foursquare can put on a map will show up when you search in the Explore tab: writing a tip, Liking a place, sharing a photo, and so on.
Don’t worry though: this functionality is only available to those who connect their Facebook account to Foursquare; everyone else will still see the same experience. Furthermore, your check-in privacy remains the same (your Facebook friends will never see them unless you friend them on Foursquare as well), and Foursquare promises it will never post to your Facebook Timeline without your permission.
Foursquare calls new feature “the power of personalization” – something that sounds like it came straight out of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s mouth. Zuck constantly talks about how everything is better when it’s social, especially when that social ingredient is Facebook. Foursquare seems to agree, and it’s hardly the first company to do so (in fact, today’s Foursquare update reminds us a lot of what Bing is doing).
We should have seen this addition coming. Last month, Foursquare started giving 1-10 ratings for locations, which we noted made it a Yelp competitor, and also began letting Foursquare users mention Facebook friends who aren’t on the service.
Facebook and Foursquare, better together? On paper, it looks good, but we’ll see soon enough how users react. Foursquare will need to work hard to ensure Facebook doesn’t drag it into a privacy disaster.
See also – Facebook refreshes ‘Nearby’ feature with discover and share options, rolling out for iOS and Android
Image credit: Andrew Beierle
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