Google’s Plan for Places: Third-Party Data
The single-best deal, assertion, investment or other strategy this week.
Who: Google
Why: For teaming up with Foursquare and others for check-ins
“In addition to taking your Google Places ratings and reviews with you, we also thought it’d be useful if you could more easily rate and review on Google the places you’ve found elsewhere in your travels or on the web,” the company wrote on its Google Places community blog.
How does the saying go? “If you can’t beat them, join them”? Google Places’ market share trails that of rivals Facebook, and Yelp, so it’s taking the portal approach: add a feed of any of your check-in services, and it’ll link up with ratings data found on Google Places. It hasn’t officially partnered with Foursquare or any other service, but that’s exactly the kind of data likely to be added.
The better question is, why hasn’t Yelp done this?
Here’s what some other folks said:
Wouldn’t it be nice if all the related services we used made it this easy to port data around from one to another so that each could make its unique value add to the common data that is the foundation of our online lives? It sure would. – Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb
What a joke! If Google was a startup, they’d be out of business long ago! At the pace they add basic features, it’s just embarrassing! Who’s the idiot who’d keep going to their Foursquare account feed and keep searching in Google Places just for the sake of rating the places with Google? – Nikolay Kolev, Oakley
Oh. RSS. Meh. … this is actually a good idea, I just wish it wasn’t such a shoddy implementation on the front-end. – MG Siegler, TechCrunch
Do you think Google’s on to something? Post your view in the comments.