App The HotList – Trace Your Friends' Movements through Facebook Places and Events

The smart app that shows you Facebook events near you just got a bit smarter, now it shows you where your friends are and where they’re planning to go. Using Facebook Places and Facebook Events the app for web and iPhone can plot a rough map of your friends’ movements.

The Hot List app is a mash-up service built on top of Facebook’s information which it filters down according to who your friends are and where you are. You need to sign in with Facebook Connect to let it pull in data from your Events calendar and News feed. The Hot List has been about since Spring ’10, but has just introduced new functionality with Places.

It’s hard to improve on what Facebook does, seeing as they do everything so well themselves and are tight with their data, but The Hot List manages to provide a genuinely useful service.

Turning up What’s Hot and Happening Near You
The original use of The Hotlist is as an Event Discovery Tool. It lets you look around and browse events that are geographically close to you. Since most events these days are advertised on Facebook, this is a really useful tool. It’s quite addictive as well, skimming a list of everything that’s going on around you mixed with profile pictures of the people going to those events. Interestingly, it also shows you the male/female ratio of people who have checked into any given location.

Seeing Where Your Friends Are
This lets you see where your friends have been according to where they have checked in on Facebook Places, then it lets you see where they’re going with Facebook Events. Only your friends with smartphones will have Facebook places but still, that allows you to track a number of your friends and their movements in a map interface as opposed to just getting Places updates dispersed throughout the news feed. Click through different days in the calendar on the web application to see where your friends are going on different days..

Where to get The HotList
You need to have a Facebook account to use The Hot List. iPhones are the only phones with a custom Hot List app but there is also a web app for anyone browsing on a PC or Mac.

The Web app has a host of useful features of its own, letting you see where your friends have been (according to their check-ins) and where they’re going on any given day of the week (according to what they have replied to Facebook events). It’s very interesting and a great way to help you plan your social calendar.

The HotLists’s privacy settings are synced with one’s Facebook settings, so you only see what you’d be able to see if you were on Facebook on a computer.