ReadWriteWeb

Normally when a tech company launches a product or feature that's billed as a potential "killer" of a popular incumbent, there's cause to be skeptical. Quite often, that's just unsubstantiated hype either on the part of the company itself or tech writers.

In the case of Spotify's new Web radio feature, we're not going to go so far as to say that it's a "Pandora killer," but its inclusion in Spotify's desktop client is going to give the up-and-coming streaming service a tangible advantage over the 11-year-old Web radio service.

Yammer surged in popularity last year. According to former Yammer Vice President of Marketing Steve Apfelberg, the company experienced triple-digit growth. It also expanded its features beyond just microblogging by adding features such as document editing, idea management and its own app store-like collection of third-party applications.

But integration in "real" enterprise software has always been missing. You can embed Yammer in Microsoft SharePoint, but not much more. That's starting to change: Yammer and ERP software-as-a-service company NetSuite announced today that the two companies are teaming up to enable Yammer users to follow invoices, shipped orders, CRM contacts and other updates from Netsuite.

This week, Greg Linden noticed a conference paper that reveals that YouTube is using Amazon.com's recommendation engine to power its own recommendations. Last week, Fast Company ran an article about how a former Amazon.com engineer is trying to help discover a better recommendation engine than his former employer. And we rediscovered a tutorial from way back in December of 2010 on how to get your hands dirty building your own recommendation system using NumPy.

A few weeks ago I wrote that we've moved to an era of the Web that is beyond social. My contention is that successful services of this era of the Web will be ones that filter, structure and personalize the vast amount of data coming onto the Web. An example of this kind of application is Hunch, which this week re-launched as an Internet personalization service. Hunch is one of a number of modern web services aiming to connect you not only to other people, but to products and objects.

Hunch co-founder and Chief Product Office Caterina Fake told Wired in a recent profile that "the ultimate goal of the company is to map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person."

Fanit is another start-up that has discovered the gospel of game play and is using it to promote their music recommendation experience.

Fans support their favorite artists and bands by purchasing badges. 100% of the money for the badges go to the artists, according to the company's PR representative. As the fan purchases badges and engages in recommendation actions, they earn "rank." That rank gives the fan a chance at "superfan" status and, according to the company, creates opportunities for interactions with the listener's favorite musicians.

From shopping to music, the overload of information on the Web has been shaped and ordered by recommendation engines. There are even tools like the browser extension GetGlue that purport to sail the entire recommendations ocean. But one very important aspect of the online experience has been overshadowed: video. Milan- and Tel Aviv-based Bee.tv, currently in beta, has introduced a proprietary, cross-platform recommendation service to personalize television, film and video viewing. Bee.tv aspires to do for video what Pandora or Last.fm do for audio.

"Bee.tv employs a proprietary algorithm that includes contextual and semantic analysis, collaborative filtering, and thematic push to deliver personalized TV, movie and video content recommendations."

We have seen our fair share of doom and gloom this year, but, according to a report from Bloomberg.com, at least Pandora, the free online music discovery service, expects to be profitable next year. Pandora was founded in in 2000, and derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes. In the interview with Bloomberg, Pandora's founder Tim Westergreen also disclosed that the service is currently adding about 50,000 new users a day, and that the service's successful iPhone app is responsible for bringing in about 20,000 of these new users.

Given how much user activity goes on every day on Facebook, the company has to be working on some kinds of recommendation technologies. Charming invisible robots that say, "If you like this, then you'll like that." Full-time Facebook watcher Nick O'Neil thought he spotted one in the wild this morning, but his readers make a convincing case that he was wrong this time.

The feature O'Neil wrote about appears to be nothing more than the latest FriendFeed rip-off: truncating repetitive activities. (Ex-Googler Paul Buchheit's FriendFeed is like a Facebook R&D lab without stock options.) Whether Facebook is doing more than that publicly or not, you know they have to be working on recommendation behind closed doors.

StumbleUpon, the popular content recommendation service, just launched a major new version of its web toolbar, which brings the StumbleUpon experience to users without having to install a browser extension. The web toolbar is similar to Digg's DiggBar, and this new and enhanced version features a fully personalized experience as well as enhancements to its sharing features. While the WebToolbar doesn't quite feature the same functionality as the standard StumbleUpon toolbar, it does make up for this by being a lot more convenient to use, and, of course, you can use it on any computer as you don't have to install the browser extension to use it.

A new online community site called Lunch.com has just launched into private beta here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The site, essentially a recommendation network, aims to bring the sort of casual conversations you would have with friends over lunch to the online arena. Using a proprietary "Similarity Network Engine," Lunch calculates what you have in common with other site members so you can share recommendations with those who have your same interests and perspectives.