Facebook Announces Database Project
Image courtesy of the U.S. Military/Department of Defense
Watch out Yelp and Foursquare. A Streetfight article by Steven Jacobs reports that Facebook is “flexing its local muscles again” after releasing its Nearby local places feature way back in December 2012. At a recent presentation at Internet Week, Engineering Manager Justin Moore said Facebook has been building a product for two years that will soon take the world by storm. It’s a sprawling database of 32 billion pieces of location-tagged content.
“Facebook has the largest and richest crowdsourced database in the world,” Moore said. “If you’ve ever used Facebook and tagged location in status updates, or interacted with location anywhere on the site, you’ve interacted with the product we’re building in the New York office.”
Moore said 10 engineers are exclusively working on building algorithms to fix and perfect the dataset and work on location-related data problems. The algorithms identify inconsistencies in location data, for example “three McDonald’s in a given mall and automatically adjust the dataset,” according to Jacobs. Editors are also working on the high-profile project, putting in information and reporting bugs.
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Facebook is also partnering with third-parties like SinglePlatform and Yext to expand the platform, Jacobs says. SinglePlatform will bring millions of restaurant menus to Facebook’s places, and Yext customers can automatically update business information from Yext to Facebook. It’s no coincidence that Moore made this announcement three weeks after Foursquare released its own plans for the future, including the new Swarm app. Facebook hopes to compete with Foursquare’s popularity by creating its own exceptional local search product and will most likely go to any lengths to do so. As Jacobs remarks, “The moment Foursquare hits a more acute rough patch, one could easily see Facebook poaching the engineering and design talent which has helped Foursquare.”
Facebook Local Search Feature
The Nearby app is now pretty buried within the main Facebook app. Since its creation almost two years ago, its name was changed from Nearby to Facebook Local Search and then back to Nearby, a Screenwerk article by Greg Sterling reports. Pretty confusing. Users of Facebook on IPhone and Android are supposed to use the mobile app feature to find businesses that are close by, with results ranked by check-ins, recommendations and Likes.
Image courtesy of Screenwerk
Back in February 2014, Sterling predicted that Nearby could be have huge potential and could even establish itself as a stand-alone app like the successful Instagram and Messenger. Separating out Nearby would really help build a strong consumer experience that’s just about places. Also if Facebook adds unique features like travel and events, this could really set the app apart. First Facebook would need to acquire and implement a local database, Sterling explains. After Facebook’s recent announcement, we can check this off the list. Next up, Facebook would need to incorporate the ability to ask your network for recommendations in a kind of Q&A feature, just like Yelp and Foursquare have done. This combined with local search and discovery capabilities would make a killer app.
That Nearby will become an established, popular, stand-alone app is speculation at this point, but what is clear is that Facebook is ready to rock the local search world after finally unveiling its massive database project. What the company will do with this is no one’s guess, but this is certain: Facebook wants to actively compete with Foursquare’s upgraded and sophisticated new search efforts. For more information on these developments, read New York Business Journal’s article on Facebook’s efforts. Here is a question for you from the SyCara Local team. Everybody got really excited about Graph Search when it was launched as a stand-alone app, but it turned out to not make as big of an impact. Is this another case of overhype or is there really something here? We’re curious to hear your thoughts. Let us know what you think in the comments section below or message us on social media.