Google hotpot
17 November, 2010 | Web design
Amongst the news of iTunes unleashing The Beatles, and Facebook unveiling a new messaging system (that’s not email, but funnily enough does include an email address at facebook.com), a certain Google service has taken a back seat.
Enter Google Hotpot.
Dubbed as the search engine for Google Places, Google Hotpot takes into account customer reviews and ratings to give users the best business results for their particular enquiry.
Once you visit the Hotpot homepage, you are asked to give your name and sign in with your Google account. Once in, it displays ‘restaurants’ as a default and asks the user to search their local area.
The interface seems like a minimalistic version of Bing’s shopping feature, which makes it clean and certainly easy to use.
This alone will not make give Hotpot that je ne sais quoi, so Google have done their best to integrate a little bit of social. All reviews are linked to your Google profile so users can find out what their friends think of local places.
Personally I think that this would be a great idea, but the majority of people simply do not use their Google profile.
Similar to Buzz we might, just might, find that this also gathers digital dust.
To give a fair argument, this could be leading to a new social network that will integrate all these services in one amazing package – only possible if Google offers users something that isn’t offered by Facebook.
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