Book-sharing service Goodreads announced today that they have purchased the book recommendation engine Discovereads. According to Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler, the acquisition addresses a frequently-requested feature.
"With their deep algorithmic book recommendation technology, we're going to be able plumb our database of 100 million book ratings from 4.6 million users to find general patterns of the kinds of books people read and to generate high-quality personalized recommendations."
The race between tech companies aiming to tell you what to do with your free time will heat up tonight with the midnight launch of version 3.0 of location-based social network Foursquare. According to the company, its long awaited recommendations feature will be included.
It's one thing for Amazon or Netflix to recommend movies or other products you might like (that's a huge business), it's another thing for an automated system to tell you where you should go when you walk out the door of your house, what real-world venues you should patronize. That's something a whole lot of companies are going to try to tackle, including Google and Facebook.
My6Sense, the personalized recommendation engine for both iOS and Android, comes to the desktop today with a Chrome extension that brings the my6sense experience to Twitter.com. What exactly is the my6sense experience? my6sense uses what it calls "digital intuition" to determine what parts of your stream, whether Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz or RSS feed, are most relevant to your interests.
We met up with Louis Gray and my6sense CEO Barak Hachamov last month to take a tour of the new product and discuss the company's plans for personalizing the Web.
The giant online publisher and aggregator Huffington Post began experimenting with a new content recommendation engine today, powered by Facebook and built by AdaptiveSemantics, the startup the company acquired last June. The feature uses the "Liked" Pages and shared articles of logged-in Facebook users who visit the Post to recommend recent content from across its wide swath of articles.
It looks like a good and relatively simple feature. Surprisingly, HuffPo readers responding in comments on the announcement absolutely hate it!
Nothing beats a good recommendation for a new band to listen to, but a recommendation for a new music blog to read can be a gift that keeps on giving. Extension.fm, a New York startup that provides a browser plug-in that captures all the MP3 files you come across and turns them into a playlist, has just announced the creation of a new experimental Labs department.
First entry into Extension's Labs is something the company calls The Super Awesome Music Blog Finder Thingy ™. Enter your Last.fm username and it will recommend new music blogs that have posted music from artists you've listened to the most over the last 30 days. It's not great, yet, but it could make a pretty great feature once more fully baked.
Handmade marketplace Etsy is experimenting with its own recommendation engine technology called the Etsy Taste Test. The tool, available at tastetest.etsy.com, offers you a short quiz where you click photos of things you like. You can choose to look at either photos of items for women or items for men. The end result is a list of recommended items matching your taste... in theory at least; the experiment is still very new and results can be mixed.
Still - an algorithm for artistic crafts? Sign us up!
YouTube will launch a new discovery tool called Topics tonight on its labs page TestTube, the company told reporters this morning. Topics will allow users to discover high-quality videos about topics of interest to them without requiring the user to enter detailed search queries.
"With Topics, YouTube will try to deliver results by honing in on comments from users on videos they have viewed, sites that have linked to the video and even what users have watched in the past," writes the BBC's Maggie Shiels this morning. A YouTube spokesperson confirmed for us by email that an official announcement will be made on the YouTube blog this evening.
Mobile application recommendation websites and services have sprung out of a growing need to filter, rank and recommend the best apps from the hundreds of thousands now available for download onto mobile phones. These sites operate outside of the official app marketplaces like the iTunes App Store and the Android Market, for example.
With iTunes now carrying 225,000 apps in its "curated" collection and Android up to 100,000, it's no wonder users have turned to other resources beyond the search box and category listings found in the official vendor-specific app stores. For the end users, recommendation sites like these prove useful, even necessary at times.
But are these sites helping developers? And if so, how much?
Last month, Condé Nast social news site Reddit asked users if they would donate their data for research purposes. This week the site made available a data dump from more than 40,000 people who opted-in to sharing what they do on the site. It's a remarkable move than every social network could learn from.
Reddit's goal for this data is to see it used to create a recommendation engine - in particular a system that would highlight some of the niche communities on Reddit that are a great place to find good topical content, but that too few people on the site have discovered. Now that the data is out in the wild, however, any number of analyses can be performed on it - and no one knows what kinds of observations about the relationship between people, web content, voting and news will be discovered. One little account preference opens up a world of opportunities: "allow my data to be used for research purposes."
With almost 300,000 iPhone apps on the market, finding new and interesting apps is getting more and more difficult for users. That's good news for apps that manage to break into the iTunes top 10, as most users use this to find new apps, but sales and downloads fall off quickly for apps that don't make it into the top 10 and good apps often go unnoticed. We have seen a number of interesting app discovery services that try to remedy this situation in recent months, but Angel's Choice (iTunes link) puts a new spin on this by adding Hollywood Stock Exchange-like game mechanics to its app discovery service.
