The relaunch of local discovery service Facebook Places was low key and remained un-noted until picked up by a German blogger this week.
Facebook’s local service is, on first look, quite impressive with it pulling together various features and data sources to give a quick guide to what’s on and what’s attractive in a city based on a user’s history.
In that respect it’s a clear threat to Yelp!, Tripadvisor and Google; particularly given the convenience of using a single app and getting recommendations based on the service most people spend the bulk of their online time upon.
At this stage it doesn’t appear the service is doing too much with the local business feature but it’s only a matter of time before those details start being fed into the algorithm as well.
Once again it shows why listings are important for local businesses. It may also be that Facebook is cracking the largely untapped local business market.