Google Hotpot was announced about a week ago but started a campaign today on Twitter. Google is advertising it as a recommendation engine that will allow you to add friends and see their ratings for certain places as well as write your own ratings. Of course besides that you can search for places near you using the iPhone or Android app, part of Google Places. Hotpot generates recommendations based on your ratings and the ratings of friends and other Hotpot users.

Is any of this ringing a bell yet? Yeah, this is basically Google's take on Yelp. Yelp lets you add friends and write reviews on places and see the top rated places near you. Yelp doesn't exactly advertise this as a recommendation engine though, which is how Google is trying to distinguish Hotpot from Yelp. I'll give them props for the smart marketing. Unfortunately, in essence, this is still just Yelp. There's no doubt in my mind that eventually check-ins will come to Hotpot, because we need another check-in service right?

So far it actually seems to be taking off. It's been trending in the iOS app store for the past 24 hours or so. In the end, I think it's going to be one of those things worth trying out for a little bit since it's being talked about, but right now I think Yelp has more features and therefore has the edge. We'll see if Google makes any noteworthy improvements in the future.