Information Cascades – Facebook’s New App “Local”
Link: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/10/16632008/facebook-local-app-events-calendar
The article discusses Facebook’s new app called Local. The app is a revamping of the original application, Events, which Facebook introduced last year. Events had a calendar which informed users of what events were happening around town. According to data from Annie, a market research firm, the app dropped out of the most downloaded iOS apps just a few days after it launched. This new app, Local, is Facebook’s second attempt. It aims to help users figure out where to eat, what events to attend, and what is going on nearby. Local is different from Events in that it allows a users’ Facebook friends, who the user obviously already knows and probably trusts, to recommend places and things to do. There is also a feature that allows users to add reviews about places and events.
I found this to be very interesting because it’s different from Facebook’s current Events tab on Facebook in that now your Facebook friends can recommend and review local places and events. I think this is very relevant to our conversation in class about information cascades. In class, we discussed that being in a network can cause others to copy the actions and decisions of others. For example, the example we mentioned in class is a scenario in which restaurant A is almost empty and restaurant B is very crowded. Even though you read a good review about restaurant A, information cascades may cause you to follow the crowd instead of your own private info. This is because you could feel better about being in a crowd, you want to meet other people, and you may assume that the people in B know something about the restaurant B that you don’t know. The Local app will feature reviews and recommendations from friends about restaurants, festivals, and kinds of local events and places. When users see that their friends have recommended one specific restaurant they will likely think highly of it too and decide to go without even doing their own thorough research. This app will allow Facebook users to see what the crowd thinks is cool and allows them to easily jump on that same bandwagon. This is an example of information cascade because the Facebook user might have heard information about more unknown local places and events and instead choose to ignore those and make his decision based on what he sees which restaurants and events other people on the Local app have gone to; instead of knowing why they recommended those specific restaurants, he only knows how many recommend it. He may just base decisions on how many positive recommendations a place has, thus meaning that he is paying more attention to what others did, not what information they know.