Facebook Adds Weather Forecasts To Events And Public Places In Quest To Show Useful Info Where People Need It

Facebook has come up with another way to stop you from leaving its site. While you’re setting up an event, especially one that’s going to take place outside, it makes total sense that your potential guests would want to know what the weather conditions are for that day. Today, Facebook rolled out a project that was a part of a hackathon, which drops weather information onto event pages and unowned pages for places like parks and cities. The positive here is that Facebook is carefully placing this information in places on the site that make sense for users, rather than jamming it all over the place. For example, seeing the weather on an event page is fine, but it’s not something I want to see on my News Feed. By providing this information, it’s just one less step you have to make when you’re making decisions on where to go. The addition of events are great for the guests, but when you’re setting up an event, you’ll also see the weather prediction for that day, which can help you form your description, suggesting that people bring a sweatshirt, perhaps: For people that you invite, they’ll see the predicted forecast for the location on the date of the event, as well as the the estimated high and low temperatures. For locations like cities and parks that have pages, a ten day forecast will be displayed. All of this data is provided by Weather Underground: These details are also available on Facebook’s mobile app: For examples of the integration for location-pages that aren’t owned by any particular user, check out the city of San Francisco, and more specifically Dolores Park, here in our neck of the woods. Once you see the weather information, you can choose to leave Facebook to get more detailed information, like satellite imagery, from Weather Underground’s site. This reminds us a little bit of Google’s move to beef up its search results for things like sports scores and schedules, displaying the important data so that you don’t have to click around to sites to find it. While this might take traffic away from third-party sources, it is helpful for users. Regardless, it’s a fine line to walk for Facebook, as there is probably a host of relevant information that it could start slapping up all over the site hastily. Nobody wants to see scores attached to status updates

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/oDeLE17bajk/

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