Interesting fusion of attractions, weather information and social media put together in the UK, aimed at making it easier to discover new things to do whilst keeping an eye on the dreaded British weather.
The service, known as Days Out and running solely on Facebook, was put together by London-based digital marketing agency Betapond for the UK’s Met Office and uses the Were Here API.
It app works by allowing users to find attractions and things to do in the UK by particular region, listed by order of popularity amongst Facebook users.
This is carried out by tapping in to the Were Here platform on Facebook, rather than “likes”, meaning that an activity or destination is ranked by those that have actually checked in to a location.
Each individual listing then takes a feed in from the Met Office’s API so a user can check the weather (temperature, expected conditions, etc) for the forthcoming day, as well as the mid-term forecast over the next five days.
Lastly, there is of course a social graph element kicking in as well, allowing any Facebook user to see if any of their network friends have visited (checked in) at one of the locations listed.
The user is automatically taken to the Facebook fan page of the listing if they want to find out more information about a particular destination or activity
The Met Office has around 17,500 fans to its Facebook page and is currently positioning the new app pretty prominently on its main page.
Whether the service will get a lot of use is another matter entirely, but what the initiative illustrates is how the social graph can be thrown together with arguably more useful metrics such as Were Here (rather than “likes”) to create a decent service.
The fly in the ointment will be with the social graph element – there were hardly any (in the small test carried out for this article) users checking in with Facebook to make the networked part of the Were Here API useful.
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