Facebook Likes You To Eat Local

Last week I was scrolling through the Notifications feed on Facebook’s iOS app and was surprised to see the above “Nearby Places for Breakfast” list showing 3 restaurants in the area with their hours, rating, price, etc. Hitting the “see more” link brings up a full list of nearby restaurants that looks just slightly Yelp-ish:

This screenshot was taken at 4:14pm so now instead of showing “Nearby Places for Breakfast” I get “Nearby Places to Eat”.  Earlier in the day I would have seen “Nearby Places for Lunch”. It’s simple but gets the job done.

There’s nothing particularly social about these listings other than the ratings, and it’s a relatively buried feature in the Notifications screen. I had to blow through multiple Notifications, Friends’ Birthdays, Trending and News Shared Locally before seeing this list, but I think the initial view of the Notifications screen has grown quite stale. I imagine this is a step towards bringing these content sections more to the front, or perhaps even breaking them off as a separate app similar to what happened to Messenger. I imagine a Facebook Local mobile app that had similar functionality to Yelp would be an instant hit.

It’s getting interesting out there folks, as usual…