Google introduced Hotpot last November as a separate product from Places, which didn’t make sense to me. It seemed to go hand-in-hand with Places (or like it should go hand-in-hand with Places), but like many of Google’s offerings – it was segmented. Maybe, if their products were better integrated with one another, they wouldn’t have such a hard time breaking into social & mobile. Things would be more intuitive, more natural, easier for users to want to participate. So. I think this is great. And it’s how they should have done it from the get-go.
Lior Ron, Google Hotpot (Places) Product Manager says,
It’s simple: Rate and review the places you know, add friends whose opinions you trust and we serve you up personalized recommendations based on those tastes.
In his blog, Ron went on to say:
It’s been incredibly exciting to watch Hotpot grow—the community has quickly expanded to millions of users who are rating more than one million times per month and enjoying a truly personalized view of the world. 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.
Google, coming in at around 13 million, is catching up to Yelp’s reviews, which are at about 15 million. The name Hotpot was chosen because it describes a shared eating experience, just as the rate & review experience is a shared experience personalized by friends’ recommendations. However, since it’s merging with Places, the name will likely go away. Bummer; I was really starting to like it.
July 11th, 2011
[...] Word on the street is that Google+ is set to rule over all Google products, meaning users may have a central hub to indulge all their online activty in one place. I think we’ve all been ready for a more fully integrated platform where Google is concerned. Google made their first significant step when Hotpot was integrated into Google places. [...]
July 20th, 2011
[...] Consumers assume that businesses with (positive) reviews are more legitimate than those without. Consumers look to one another for honest opinions which is why reviews are so important: user-generated content is influential. [...]
July 26th, 2011
[...] Hotpot into Places is a good example of Google’s growing pains/improvements – click here. Along the same lines, is a post discussing whether or not Google had spread themselves too thin [...]