StumbleUpon is on a roll. As of August 2011, the U.S.'s biggest serendipity engine drove drive half of all social media traffic, surpassing Facebook, the social network that formerly held that bragging right.
Today StumbleUpon announces a complete overhaul of its platform and logo, as it aims to make the site more visually oriented and simpler to use. Now the user profile makes visible all connections, comments, interests, channels, likes, shares, inbox and history. All of a user's thumbs-up are visible through the profile. The new StumbleUpon also features channels, which are essentially sponsored Twitter-like accounts that a user can follow. Plus, the layout looks a lot more like its social network cousin, Pinterest.
How can you improve the results of one of the Web's most effective and respected recommendation engines? By pairing it up with another one.
That's exactly what the team at Hunch has done. The personalized recommendation service launched their browser-based Netflix Predictor today, which uses the company's "taste graph" to help determine what movie you should watch next.
Personalized iPad magazine discovery app Zite introduced a new update, humorously named Sybil, which allows users to switch between multiple profiles (or personalities, if you'd prefer). Aside from satisfying your alter-ego, it's now easier to share an iPad with other people, since they'll be able to create their very own profiles. This update arrived after Zite surveyed 335 iPad users, discovering that 30% shared their device with one or more people.
Goodreads, a social network that lets readers rate and review books, has launched a recommendation engine designed to help users choose what to read next.
The new feature comes six months after the startup acquired Discovereads, a book recommendation engine which is something CEO Otis Chandler cited as a sought-after feature among Goodreads users.
Personalized iPad magazine application Zite has confirmed that it has been acquired by CNN. The sales price is rumored to be in the $20 to $25 million range. Zite will not be branded exclusively to CNN and will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the news network.
It is an interesting play by CNN. Zite is a powerful news reading iPad app with a lot of excellent functionality. It operates almost like a "Pandora for news" that gives users serendipitous resources based on inputted interest and usage. Yet, outside of being a cool iPad app, Zite is driven by some interesting technology that could be of great use to CNN.
Apple's acquisition of mobile assistant Siri and its partnership with speech recognition leader Nuance Communications (the latter confirmed by references found in code), appear to be coming together in the launch of a new feature called "Assistant," to appear in the forthcoming update to iOS 5, Apple's mobile operating system.
According to leaked information, it appears that the smart technology found in the Siri iPhone application will now be fully baked into the operating system itself. With Nuance's ability to understand natural language queries, iOS 5 will have it all - voice navigation, voice control and voice assistance - allowing users to go beyond simple search and basic actions. When Siri's technology is fully integrated, users will be able to direct their iPhone to actually "do" things, too.
Document hosting and sharing site Scribd is venturing into the mobile space in order to give its publishers an opportunity to attract more readers. With a new mobile reader application called Float, Scribd aggregates content from news sites, magazines, blogs, and Scribd.com as well as from your social networks like Facebook and Twitter. You can also save items you find online to read later in Float, with the use of a specialized browser bookmarklet.
But what's most unique about this app is the way it reformats the text for the small screen. The "floating text" reading experience, which gives the app its name, reflows text originally formatted for the Web for better reading on mobile devices.
New from a company called Clever Sense is an app called Alfred (iTunes link) that provides personalized recommendations for restaurants, coffee shops, nightlife, bars and clubs, and soon, hotels, salons, spas, shops, attractions and more. The interesting thing about how the app does so is the technology it is uses behind the scenes. Instead of relying primarily on collaborative filtering, a technique found at sites like Netflix and Amazon ("people who like this also like that"), Alfred uses model-based learning, a type of artificial intelligence.
In Alfred's case, the app uses its smarts to understand the way that people talk about places, and then creates personalized interest graphs that grow and change with each action a user takes and each decision they make.
Popular iPad magazine app and Apple's iPad App of the Year Flipboard has just released a new version featuring a handful of updates, including one which has the company rethinking a user's first-time experience with the application. Now, instead of having to configure Flipboard with your favorite sources for online news, photos and other topics, a new content guide lets you immediately start browsing well-known websites formatted in an easy-to-read magazine-style layout.
Flipboard has also added built-in search, LinkedIn integration and has reformatted how the links from Twitter appear. But the company's biggest update is still yet to come.
Only a few weeks ago, when local discovery app WHERE launched a recommendation engine for sharing places with friends, I said I wished someone would build an app that used Facebook or Foursquare checkins instead. As it turns out, someone did just that. A new application called PathCrosser, launching right now in the iTunes App Store and Android Market is a mobile app that, like WHERE, uses Bump technology to compare your own personal local recommendations with your friends. With the Bump integration, you simply launch the app and tap phones with another person to make a connection. But unlike WHERE, it doesn't expect to use data housed only within its own service - it pulls data from the services you already use: Facebook and Foursquare.
If you're looking for a new app to try while waiting in line for some of those SXSW parties tonight, give PathCrosser a go and see what you think.
