TL;DR
Facebook has rebranded its standalone Events app as “Facebook Local”. Available in the U.S. on iOS and Android, Facebook Local combines events and places to a single search engine powered by Facebook’s 70 million business pages plus reviews and check-ins.
After the not-so-great launch of its standalone Events app last year, Facebook has rebranded and relaunched the app as Facebook Local. Local will not only have event-related information like before but now also will include information about local businesses, what places your friends have visited, events and places around you that your friends are interested in and reviews about all those places.
“The new app, Facebook Local, helps you easily find what to do, where to go, where to eat, or what you need — all recommended by the people you know and trust,”
Aditya Koolwal, Product manager.
Easily might be the key here as all things considered the Facebook Events app never crossed the Top 100 mark on the social networking apps charts since it got only 100,000 downloads.
What can you do with Facebook Local?
As with everything Facebook, The Facebook Local app is quite integrated with pretty much everything and proves to be quite handy. Here’s a list of just a few cool things that you can do with it:
- Check the weather.
- Look at the events that are trending near you.
- A list of events that your Facebook friends have expressed interest in attending.
- Take a look at events happening a week from now and plan for it.
- Search for any restaurant, café or bar near you.
To top this all off, the ‘Discover’ feed shows the top suggestions and everything that’s trending with your friends along with a Calendar tab organizes all your Event info, invitations, and RSVPs. And in case you’re traveling, Facebook Local will let you change your location to see everything happening in that city.
With all this, if Facebook decides to promote the Facebook Local app aggressively, it’s going to pose a much stiffer competition to Yelp and Foursquare paving the way for future potential additions such as native ordering food, booking tables and buy tickets right from the app. And knowing Facebook, this seems like just a matter of time.
The standalone Facebook Local app is now available in the US app store for both Android and Apple iOS devices.
