Foursquare adds recommendations from your Facebook friends to Explore

Foursquare is hitting back hard at Facebook’s new “Nearby” feature. Today they rolled out a change that brings data from more of your Facebook friends into your Explore feed — even if you’re not friends on Foursquare.

Since Foursquare users typically have a tighter friend circle than they do on Facebook, they often have Facebook friends who are members of Foursquare but aren’t Foursquare friends. This change lets users tap in to that larger data set for recommendation purposes but keeps their check-in privacy the same.

If a Facebook friend leaves a tip or likes a place it will be now factored in when calculating your Explore recommendations. Those recommendations will appear as the reasoning above items in Explore.

The change comes days after Facebook revealed their “Nearby” feature that functions as a local business search taking advantage of check-in data from Facebook’s larger user base. It’s nowhere near as powerful as Explore at this point, but stands as a potential challenge to Foursquare simply based on Facebook’s much larger mobile installed base.