Discover New Places From Your Hotpot Friends on Google Maps

(Cross-posted from the Lat Long Blog.)

When you need a great restaurant, hotel or pub, who do you turn to first for a recommendation? Your friends. We wanted to recreate that exchange with Hotpot, our local recommendation engine from Google Places, which allows you to add friends whose opinions you trust and see their place recommendations right in your search results.

Because we find adding friends on Hotpot so valuable to the experience, today we’re excited to announce a new feature that makes it easy to stay up to date with the latest place recommendations from your Hotpot friends.

If you’re a Hotpot user, when you visit Google Maps on your desktop computer, you’ll now see a stream listing the most recent rating and review activity of your Hotpot friends.

Here’s what Maps looks like for me:

Keep in mind this feature is in beta mode, which means we’ll be building it out over time, making it even easier for you to keep track of your friends’ activities.

Visit Google Maps right now to discover that great new restaurant or bar you should check out this weekend. And be sure to thank the Hotpot friend who recommended it!

Posted by Octavian ‘Vivi’ Costache, Hotpot Engineer