Remember the Google Hotpot service that no one really uses? Well, it’s going away as a standalone service and will be merged with Places for all your location-based needs.
Google Hotpot is a personalized, location-based recommendation service where users can put in their reviews of restaurants and other locations. You can sort of think of it as the search giant’s answer to Yelp but with a stronger focus on location and mobile.
The search king says it has been a wild success and it will be “graduating” to Places:
Based on this success, we’ve decided to graduate Hotpot to be a permanent part of our core local product offering, Google Places. Rolling Hotpot into Google Places helps simplify the connection between the places that are rated and reviewed and the more than 50 million places that already have an online presence through Google Places—places that millions of people search for and find every day on Google.
Putting Google Hotpot into Places makes a lot of sense, as it simplifies the branding and it gives users more functionality with the single Places app. We talked about how Android will get more clout with Larry Page’s reorganization of Google and we should also point out that the company’s location-based services will also get a shot in the arm.
Googler Marissa Mayer has been the boss of Google’s location-based services and she indicated that the Hotpot/Places merger would likely occur (note: Jeff Huber is now VP of Local). Google is also placing a bigger emphasis on social networking and you can be sure that its location layer will play an important part in that.
It does have the assets for this, as Google Maps is widely used and the Navigation app is quite a revelation. The Latitude location-tracking service isn’t widely used but it shows that the company has the potential to implement strong check-in services that are augmented with Hotpot reviews, directions and more.
