TripAdvisor’s revamped restaurant ratings app Local Picks helps users share where they’ve eaten and find new spots to try. The Facebook app also feeds TripAdvisor valuable data for its social travel site.

TripAdvisor is the No. 10 Facebook app developer according to our AppData tracking service. Five years since launch, its Cities I’ve Visited app still has 330,000 monthly active users — more than eight times as many users as its competitor Where I’ve Been. TripAdvisor’s biggest app, however, is its website integration with 33.2 million MAU. Now we’ll see if the company can find success in the crowded restaurant search and ratings space.

Local Picks brings TripAdvisor user’s ratings and reviews to the Facebook canvas with an algorithm that favors ratings from locals. The app also includes photos, check-ins and quick tips from Foursquare. Users can rate a restaurant, mark it as a favorite, indicate that they want to go there, or add the restaurant to a custom list, for example “Places to take a date.” These Open Graph actions will appear on Timeline and in News Feed.

Since its launch about a week and a half ago, Local Picks has reached about 70,000 monthly active users, according to AppData. The app had highs of 10,000 daily active users on Friday and Saturday. TripAdvisor Director of Product Jamie Conroy did not share details about how the app got this initial wave of users, though he says it wasn’t from an ad campaign.

TripAdvisor has some advantages over competitors like Yelp, in that it already has international scale and is making more use of social data. The app has 850,000 restaurants from more than 200 countries, and it will release translated versions later this month. Local Picks also pulls in ratings and reviews made on TripAdvisor.com, and displays friends’ Facebook check-ins, as seen in the image to the right. When users take action within Local Picks, that information can ultimately be used back on TripAdvisor. Not only will it provide more social context for a user’s friends who visit the site, but it could begin to give the company a better idea of a user’s tastes so that it can provide better recommendations to them in the future.

One problem Local Picks could face is that except for some power users, most users don’t continue to rate and review restaurants after the first time they use an app. Conroy says the Local Picks’ Open Graph integration will help draw users back into the app because they will see their friends’ activity in News Feed. There’s also a bit of gamification with users able to achieve higher “foodie levels” the more they interact with the app. However, with Local Picks unavailable for mobile, it might be difficult for users to remember to go home and rate the places they’ve tried.

Conroy says a Local Picks mobile app is something TripAdvisor is considering, but building the app within the Facebook canvas was first priority. He says having the app on Facebook is more familiar for users than if the app lived off-site. TripAdvisor has found this with its Cities I’ve Visited app. Conroy says Local Picks applies many of the learnings the company gained from its other app, including how it publishes to users’ Timelines and asks users to invite their friends, as well as the overall emphasis on lightweight interactions. Local Picks, like Cities I’ve Visited, gives users lists of other users’ top spots, and makes it easy for them to add their ratings.

Although TripAdvisor positions Local Picks as something people might use on a daily or weekly basis, this will be a challenge for the company. But even if users visit Local Picks once and add ratings for a few restaurants nearby, TripAdvisor can significantly expand its database of social travel recommendations. The Open Graph integration might prompt some users to rate more places down the line, and TripAdvisor could also run re-engagement campaigns, as it has for its other apps. Overall, though, the company and users will benefit even from one-time use, as long as the app achieves the same scale Cities I’ve Visited did over time.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

TripAdvisor today expanded the personalization of its travel site to highlight reviews from friends of users’ Facebook friends.

When people research hotels, attractions or other vacation information on the site, they will see reviews first from their friends, followed by reviews from friends of friends. Visitors have the option to send the the reviewer a private message with further travel questions. TripAdvisor says this friends of friends feature means visitors are now 10 times more likely to see social context when they use the travel site.

For example, a user might not have any friends who have rated hotels in Istanbul, but there is much higher probability that one of the hundreds of thousands of the user’s friends of friends has. You can try it for yourself here. Make sure you’re logged into Facebook, then scroll down and look for a notification like the one seen right.

TripAdvisor VP of Global Product, Adam Medros tells us one out of four new reviews on the site is created by users who have logged in with Facebook. He says the site also only shows friends of friends’ data for “opinionated content” — ratings and reviews — not in other features like lists of friends who have visited or lived in a place, where it might not be as relevant. TripAdvisor also includes friends’ names and profile photos, but doesn’t provide full names or photos of friends of friends, which are not likely to have the same meaning to users.

TripAdvisor has a long history developing travel-related apps on the Facebook platform. The travel site created Cities I’ve Visited in 2007. The app, which let users add pins on a map to the places they’ve been, quickly surpassed competitors and still has 3.4 million monthly active users today, according to AppData. TripAdvisor became an “Instant Personalization” partner in 2010, and remains one of only eight sites that can access basic Facebook user data without requiring users to authorize an app.

With Instant Personalization, TripAdvisor can show any logged-in Facebook user which of their friends has indicated that they’ve been to a destination or reviewed something on the site. It pulls data from users’ profiles like hometown, current city, check-ins and Likes, as well as data from the Cities I’ve Visited app. The company also launched an Open Graph-enabled version of Cities I’ve Visited this year and is considering ways it might do the same for the main TripAdvisor site.

Other apps like Yelp, and even Facebook itself, would benefit from showing friends of friends’ information similar to how TripAdvisor now does. Facebook seems to use data from friends of friends to influence its internal search rankings and other algorithms, but it doesn’t explain how and where it does so. The most explicit use of friends of friends’ data appears on the social network’s careers page which lists “people you might know who work at Facebook.” Underneath those words are thumbnails and links to Facebook employees with whom users have mutual friends.

We haven’t yet seen Facebook promote social games or personalize pages based on friends of friends activity, but one day it might. For example, if users don’t have any friends who play a particular game, Facebook could display how many friends of friends are active users. Facebook could also prioritize page posts or place recommendations from friends of friends, along with a note about how users are connected to the author.

If Facebook expands its search product, as it is rumored to, we might see the company put more emphasis on friends of friends’ data in order to provide social context in areas that a person’s immediate connections don’t cover. Although, seeing how TripAdvisor has incorporated Facebook suggests the social network might not have to improve its own search. It can let Bing, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes and others make their search features more personalized by including friends of friends’ recommendations.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook just launched a new Instant Personalization integration with travel planning site TripAdvisor. When users who are signed into Facebook visit the site, they’ll see a map of cities their friends have visited, a list of which cities have been visited by the most friends, and recent reviews and site activity by friends. Instant Personalization will automatically provide social recommendations, make it easy for users to make informed travel decisions with TripAdvisor.

People are accustomed to asking friends for travel suggestions and advice, making TripAdvisor a wise choice for the expansion of the Instant Personalization program. Without it, TripAdvisor can overwhelm users with its enormous database of travel reviews, and doesn’t provide a good entry point to exploring the site for those without a specific destination in mind. Since a person’s accommodation and travel activity preferences are often similar to their peers, reviews and destinations of friends are likely to be much more relevant than those of strangers.

The site culls data from TripAdvisor’s popular Cities I’ve Visited Facebook app to populate the visited cities map and “Your friends’ most popular destinations” list. The app became popular in the early days of Facebook applications, with users proudly displaying their map of previous travel destinations on the now deprecated profile box. Cities I’ve Visited already had over 1.8 million MAU by September of 2008, according to AppData.

By default, the map shows destinations from all of a user’s friends, but the travel histories of individual friends can be viewed by clicking on the photos to the right. In addition to the home page integrations, when users click through search results for cities, hotels, and more they’ll see which of their friends have visited that city.

Facebook launched the Instant Personalization program at this year’s f8 conference, and has since been striving to educate users on how the program only uses publicly available information, albeit without a user’s prior consent. After pausing the roll out of the program for a few months, Facebook began adding more sites, with Microsoft search engine Bing and web TV recommendations site Clicker being the latest to receive the integration. Facebook maintains that it will only provide Instant Personalization on trusted, high-quality, inherently social sites.

With the program now covering travel, food, TV, movies, music, reading, search, and collaboration, additional areas it could expand to include fashion or exercise, with fbFund winners Weardrobe and FriendFit as good candidates.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook