Facebook has come up with another way to prevent 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 surfacing this information in places on the site that make sense for users, rather than cramming it all over the place so that it just feels like clutter. 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 is 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. If the event is within the next 10 days, you’ll see a 10-day forecast:
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, you’ll see current conditions. 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 that mention specific sports teams, for example. For now, weather seems to be a nice place to start and it’s doubtful that anyone will complain.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
Weather Underground is committed to delivering the most reliable, accurate weather information possible. Wunderground.com’s state-of-the-art technology monitors conditions and forecasts for locations across the world, so you’ll always find the weather information that you need. In addition to providing free, real-time online weather information to millions of Web users around the world, Weather Underground also streams live weather data to thousands of news and media outlets around the world.
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