Loomia is a content recommendation service that uses a Facebook application to track what you and your friends are reading on Loomia-supporting sites and then shows you what content is most popular among your social circle. The company has made a big turnaround, from initially focusing on podcast recommendations to today working with some of the biggest publishers on the web and announcing a $5 million round of venture funding.
We like recommendation engines here at RWW and this struck me as one of the first truly useful Facebook applications I've seen yet. A closer look at the app shows good news and bad news, though.
The basic premise here is great. You add the Loomia Facebook application, give it access to your friends, networks and groups list, then it tracks what you're reading on sites ranging from the Wall St. Journal online to NBC Video to YouTube and TMZ. (Plus TechCrunch, where's the RWW love?)
There must be some other magic, premium or algorithmic, going on because the service does serve up "popular" content even when the available data set is little to nothing. By making news tracking opt-out on a site by site basis, Loomia is able to wring popularity data out of the 7500 people that have installed the app. Only 1% of those users, 75 people, currently go back daily and use the Loomia Facebook app to read news. They are anonymized, so I don't know who among my friends has read what.
There are cookies flying all around but for some reason the Wall St. Journal, for example, only serves up a "What your Facebook Friends Are Reading" box of links powered by Loomia if you got to that WSJ article through a Loomia link. What looks like really valuable real estate for another content recommendation startup is actually being seen by a very, very small number of users. The BNet (cool site by the way) feed I'm shown by Loomia is 3/4ths blank headlines and there too I'm only shown Facebook recommendations if my referring URL was from Loomia.
Users might be more likely to use the Loomia app actively if it served up news better. There's no option to view the items sorted by date instead of relevance, there's no pagination for more than a limited number of items and there's no (authenticated) RSS feed that lets you view what's popular with your friends from other applications.
In the end, though I have more than 400 friends on Facebook (including 22 of the most tech news savvy who have added Loomia) and I have joined lots of groups, there appears to be a very low thresh hold for "popular among [my] friends" status. It's a good thing I've joined a lot of groups, I guess.
I don't remember joining the Facebook group "Pee on your Laptop and put it on DormItem!" (DormItem.com is a college classified ad site I reviewed once) but now the other members of that group are influencing what news I'm served up. I can filter to see just the news from one group or network, but this is getting complicated and the results end up pretty sparse. I'm left with the "I'm not really going to use this" feeling so common after a few minutes with any Facebook app.
Recommendation engines are going to be really important as soon as they are fully baked. Services like StumbleUpon, Last.fm and Amazon have demonstrated that it can work - but there are far more startups that haven't nailed it yet.
Loomia probably got its VC backing because the company is good at selling to big media outlets, the theoretical value to all parties is very clear and the opt-out clickstream tracking is very powerful. Perhaps they've got a vision for how to close the loop on user experience and keep people coming back, but for now we can only imagine.
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I wish Loomia had stayed in the podcast recommendation business, although I understand why it wasn't a viable long-term strategy. They had a unique take on "podcast search" and with both Loomia and Podzinger out of the picture, there's not much left by way of podcast discovery for the average consumer. It's a shame, since there's more great content than ever to discover, yet ever more crappy content out there to keep people from finding it.
Posted by: Greg | April 2, 2008 12:16 PMmy other problem with Loomia is the company's confusing branding. I saw the "seen this?" on WSJ and thought first that it was another product of Clickability (the 'email this' 'save this' guys, their CEO happens to be a friend from high school so I've tracked them over the years). I wonder if that wasn't intentional as I was certainly more eager to use a service that's been around forever.
$5 million for 75 regular users?
Posted by: gisarah.myopenid.comLack of critical mass is going to kill Loomia. Unless you have hundreds of friends with the application, this just isn't useful.
I like the vision - but the single path to getting success is through user application installs...and thats never a good idea.
I hope they have something good up their sleeve with the 5 million in VC money.
Posted by: Jesse | April 2, 2008 12:32 PMJesse, it doesn't take having hundreds of friends using the apps, you could belong to networks where there are hundreds of people using it and get some kind of benefit.
Posted by: Marshall KirkpatrickThat's true. The network thing is a nice touch, but it is icing on the undelivered promise of seeing how many of your friends are reading articles.
Posted by: Jesse | April 2, 2008 1:27 PMThe missing headlines on the unit on BNET were caused by a problem with the feed that we were giving to Loomia. We've provided them with a different feed, so the headlines are all showing now.
Posted by: John Potter | April 3, 2008 9:29 AM