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Yesterday, the world got it's umpteen-millionth iPhone app for recommending your favorite things to all your social media friends. This category is so overstuffed that there were probably several such launches yesterday, but I'm referring to Stamped, an NYC-based startup founded by former Googlers and backed by Google Ventures. Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, is an advisor, and so is celebrity chef Mario Batali. It's a high-profile launch, and it shows in the distinctive design of the app.

Do we need another app for recommending cafes and sushi bars to each other? No. But perhaps we should get rid of the older ones and keep Stamped. Its distinguishing feature is the lack of 5-star ratings. If you like something, you just stamp it with approval. Stamped is satisfying to use; there's no guesswork involved. With Google's voracious need for consumer data about local businesses, no wonder Google Ventures backed it.

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.

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.

Google Hotpot, the Yelp-like local recommendations service, has just introduced a new feature: filtered searches by friend. The way it works is this: when you search for a particular type of business on Hotpot, say "Italian restaurants," for example, you can click on a friend's name beside his recommendation in the search results to see all the Italian restaurants that friend has rated and reviewed, and see them plotted on a map.

The feature is also available now on Android phones, says Google.

With hundreds of thousands of mobile applications available in iTunes, how do you find the good ones? You can read reviews online, seek out new releases via third-party app recommendation sites, check iTunes' Genius picks or its "top sellers" lists, but at the end of the day, one of the most popular ways to find new apps is still the most traditional: personal recommendations.

Now, it looks like Apple is working on technology that will capitalize on that trend. A patent application reveals that Apple has developed a system for sharing applications through peer-to-peer connections with other phones.

International Web standards body, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released a new standard for developers of mobile Web applications. The document, published as a W3C Recommendation, is titled "The Mobile Web Application Best Practices" and it offers practical advice on everything from relevant engineering practices to tips on creating a better user experiences.

The document is available now in a number of formats including PDF, Web site, mobile site and quick reference, infographic-like images.

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.

What do you get when you combine the biggest collection of personal taste data in history with the world's easiest method of subscribing to syndicated content? In theory, one of the most potent recommendation engines around. Facebook quietly made available to all its 500 million plus users a new feature today called the Page Browser and though everything about it is quite understated - it could prove to be a very big deal.

Users must navigate directly to the Page Browser, there doesn't appear to be any link from the main interface. The page shows big icons for a list of pages Facebook thinks you might like; click on one and you'll "Like" it. Of course Facebook has succeeded by making very potent interactions seem simple from the outside - and this new feature is more of the same.