Platial+Frappr+Place Recommendation Engine

On Thursday at Web 2, Platial announced the acquisition of Frappr. Mikel has a great post about the geoweb in general and its momentum. Why on earth would such a small start-up do such a thing? Well, for one, we need some consolidation of this great (currently fragmented) data to offer the kind of service we've been dreaming about. Not just what's nearby, but who's nearby and when it comes to people on maps, Frappr is the hands down leader. They've collected over 100MM people pins (markers with people on them). Most of these are in groups like Myth Busters, Harley Riders, Jones Soda Drinks, Fighting the New World Order and such. For us the work is just beginning to take all of these geobits (photos, videos, people, feeds, places all with location) and making them useful and meaningful-- a free global resource.

So as social mapping matures everyone will benefit.

As we collected more and more of these geobits we needed the best interface for navigating it with great relevance. You may have noticed that last week we started testing live our new place recommendation engine and built from scratch geosearch. We'll be adding to this with great intensity but we've been working on this for months (yeah! Maciej) just to start being able to offer related maps, people, places around the world as well as personal recommendations for registered users. Please try it out and let us know what you think. We're still tweaking all of the back-end algorithms and adding more features.

Search Independent Bookstores in San Francisco- in addition to place ranked search results you'll see Related maps and Related People.

Or Try Chocolate in the World. Yummm.

Search For DIY in Portland, OR and click on any place in the list to see similar places!

Or Ricky Martin or Coffee in London  or Birding in Japan or Restaurants in Amsterdam, NL or Vegan in NY or Love

Although we're surprising light on death metal so please add!