Your iPhone can now have friends but Urbanspoon can do so much more

Well this week at South by Southwest Interactive, Facebook announced just that - how they were bringing Facebook Connect to the iPhone. This is exciting and I've just started testing some of the applications like Urbanspoon and Flixster to see how they're harnessing the social influence with Facebook Connect. Here are a few early thoughts on the Urbanspoon implementation.

In the case of Urbanspoon, its success is dependent upon how many of your friends use the application too. It isn't enough for Urbanspoon to enable you to login with your FB credentials and see whether any of your friends have reviewed a restaurant. Urbanspoon must allow you to send your reviews to your Facebook profile and encourage others to comment on your reviews too. In other words, I believe the integration will be a success if it not only connects you with reviews written by friends on Urbanspoon but also connects you with activity within Facebook and people's opinions there. I don't think it does that as yet.

But that's not all, I would like Urbanspoon to provide me with personalized recommendations based on my Facebook profile. Why shouldn't it? It has access to that data after all. I'd also like Urbanspoon to recommend restaurants for me to visit with my wife by comparing my Facebook profile and rating patterns to hers. It can't do all of this today but that's the potential with the Facebook social graph integration now. 

I would also like events on Facebook to be linked to reviews in Urbanspoon. For example, if I'm invited to an event at a specific restaurant, I'd like to see within Facebook the Urbanspoon reviews for it and whether any of them are written by friends. (I recognize this thought is a lot more than a simple FB Connect implementation but that's the user experience they should be striving for).

And lastly, I'd like a live streaming option telling me of all the recent restaurant reviews by friends in the city. What they've reviewed, when they've reviewed and where those restaurants are located. Sort of like a twitter feed of friend reviews. This will influence where I go to eat next in a natural socially influenced manner. Needless to say, a future business model for Urbanspoon could be inserting the occasional advertisement into this stream.

Allowing me to see the reviews of my friends is a big step forward but it alone is not enough to truly harness the social influence. Urbanspoon needs to be integrated into the social fabric of my life on Facebook harnessing the profile data, creating streams and integrating with events too.