Laurence Hooper and Dan Goodman (former AOL), created Loladex, a local search application for Facebook. The two men took some of their AOL earnings and founded Loladex, which launched end of March, 2008. We added this application to Facebook and were sad to see it was focused on Washington DC; however, once added it immediately pulled up a bunch of local Arizona restaurants.
With Web 2.0 and users relying on social reviews in their decision making process, this tool is a great idea and integrated with Facebook could become quite succesful. Loladex combines local search with the recommendation and rating possibilities inherent in social networks. Loladex already has about 16 million listings. The application is able to return localized results based on recommendations and ratings made by Facebook friends. “Loladex mimics the way people think about things in the off-line world,” Goodman said.
These kind of applications from outside developers have taken advantage of the site’s open application platform. Check it out at Loladex.
Changes are afoot at Facebook (per iMedia Connection). The once red-hot social network has bid farewell to Owen Van Natta, the CRO who helped the company secure a $240 million investment from Microsoft, and now there are reports that it’s looking for a high-level executive to serve as a kind of second in command to founder Mark Zuckerberg.
According to Kara Swisher at BoomTown, sources close to the company say that Zuckerberg himself has been looking for a well-known technology executive to give him more support.
Such a search couldn’t come at a better time for Facebook, which has been beaten up a bit with reports that its opt-out program was beset by technical glitches. But perhaps more alarming for Facebook are reports that fatigue has begun to set in with users in the U.K. According to a BBC story, the social network saw a 5 percent drop in users from December to January. Facebook now has about 8.5 users in the U.K.
So Facebook will finally allow users to group friends and control information flow based on friend type. For guys like Robert Scoble, who have 5,000 friends (the limit), this may be a way to finally sort through the real friends from the fans. It’s a much needed feature that people have been requesting for a long time.
It also shows the steady maturity of Facebook from a college network to a full on world network, where friendships, business contacts, family and other types of relationships need to be more fully described. And this is also as much about privacy as it is about organization – users will be able to limit the information that certain friend groups receive.
To read more, check out TechCrunch.
