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.

Instead of just hoarding reviews, Stamped controls for the quality of its users to make its recommendations better. You only get 100 stamps to start off, and you get more depending on how popular your reviews are. "Review sites are cluttered with recommendations from people you don't know and don't care about," co-founder/CEO Robby Stein says. "We're focused on quality - only the people you trust recommending only what they truly like best."

The app is integrated with Google Places to pull up place data. It also has built-in OpenTable, Amazon, iTunes and Fandango support, so users can act immediately on their friends' recommendations. In other words, it's easy to act on the recommendations you find on Stamped.

There's attention to little details that goes a long way - for instance, you get to customize the color and gradient of your personal stamp. That seems silly, but it makes the list of stamps much easier to scan, and it gives you an emotional signal about the stamper in question. That's a neat little device, much more useful than trying to interpret what ✭✭✭½ means to a stranger.

Why Is Google Interested?

It makes sense that Google wants a stake in Stamped. Google has skin in the local recommendations game, and its current Google Places reviews use the same old 5-star rating system as its main competitor, Yelp. With its acquisition of Zagat, Google has secured the jackpot of professional-quality local business reviews, but it needs something distinctive to make user-generated recommendations more interesting.

Stamped's simplicity and focus on quality sets it starkly apart from the easily gamed recommendations on Yelp. It also couldn't be more different from the new Kevin Rose project, Oink, which is really complicated and makes scary pig noises. If you're unsatisfied with the state of recommendation apps, you might find that Stamped is the one that lets you delete the rest of them.

Which social recommendation apps do you use?

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.

It seems that the app works, and people like it.

How Did Alfred Get So Smart?

One of the biggest technical challenges the company had to overcome to release Alfred was building its own Web crawlers for the Internet. These bots look for information about places, harvest that data and index it, including recommendations and reviews sites like Yelp, Citysearch and others.

Alfred also learns the language people use when they talk about places, for example, "bad-***" (replace those stars with a word beginning with "a") actually means "good." It's a smart little bot, that Alfred.

When you launch the app for the first time, it walks you through a quick quiz to establish some of your favorites as a starting point. You can exit the quiz at any time, but it's a good way to quickly train the app, we found. It can also learn more about you from your check-in data, but only Facebook Places is supported at present.

The app provides access to restaurant menus, links to the user reviews it found, photos of the business and offers you the ability to call, save, share (email, SMS or Facebook) a place with friends.

As you continue to use Alfred, it takes into account things like the time of day, the day of the week, your location and other signals in order to provide you with the best recommendations for you. You can also thumbs up/thumbs down the recommendations it provides to further train the app.

Future: Deals Integration and More Platforms

In the future, Alfred plans to integrate deals within the application too, but deals would only be one of the signals it takes into account when providing recommendations.  What's most important, is that it finds the right place for you.

Although the app is only available on the iPhone for now, the iPad version will be out soon, and then an Android and Windows Phone version will follow in just a few months. There will also be a Web experience to accompany the app by year-end or early next year which, will offer a more extensive feature set that what you see now on mobile.

We found that Alfred was pretty smart with its recommendations, and it even surprised us by suggesting restaurants we had never heard of and now want to try. You can give Alfred a whirl too, if you like: the app is free on iTunes here.

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.

The newest release of Flipboard is more evolutionary than revolutionary. The most notable change is the improved access to finding and discovery content. In the latest version, tapping on a red ribbon at the top right of the home screen ("More") takes you into a content guide where you can delve into sections dedicated to topics like "Business," "Science & Technology," "Cool Curators," "Art & Photography" and others.

When viewing articles or posts from these sources, a new "Add" button at the top of the screen lets you mark the publication as a "Favorite" for easier access in the future.

Also new is a "Featured" section which Flipboard will use to showcase its partners, the latest addition being The Economist, which will be available at launch. Although many websites can be viewed in Flipboard, the company's partners have the ability to run magazine-style advertisements alongside their articles, formatted in a reading-friendly iPad layout, and track the visits from the application's users.

LinkedIn, Search & More

Another big update this summer release is the new LinkedIn integration. Flipboard is the first company to provide third-party access to LinkedIn Today, a news feed-like look at various industry verticals. 37 major industries are covered by LinkedIn Today, like Food & Beverage, Law and Non-Profit, for example. The end result is something like a trade magazine for following your industry's most important news.

Other updates to Flipboard include the added ability to continue flipping through a magazine or publication after reaching the last page of article, a revamped way to read articles coming from tweets (the article is now given priority while the tweet and its associated actions are moved to the bottom of the page) and the addition of a search feature that returns results for RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook updates, results from Flickr, Instagram, Google Reader and more. People search is supported as well.

There are several "behind-the-scenes" improvements, too, to make the app run faster and to offer less noticeable user interface improvements in spots.

Coming Soon: Personalized Recommendations

However, what we really wanted to know was when Flipboard would begin to capitalize on the technology it acquired at launch through a startup once known as Ellerdale.

The answer is that Flipboard has already done so. And we'll see more of that technology soon, according to Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue.

Ellerdale's smart data-parsing algorithms are currently used in the app's search feature and for deriving what's popular on its network, but Ellerdale's technology will be even further baked into the product in the near future.

Will this just be a series of incremental updates, like what we've seen so far? Or does Flipboard have an even bigger launch on the horizon? Both, says McCue. The product will get smarter over time, as new versions are released. But another update, which McCue says is "coming pretty soon" will offer an even better personalized experience involving recommendations.

In the meantime, Flipboard's next big focus is its iPad app, due to arrive later this summer. Versions for Android or other platforms aren't out of the question, but the company hasn't reached any solid conclusions on that front.

The new version of Flipboard is now live in iTunes here and is a free download.

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 PathCrosser application keeps it simple - it's not a Yelp competitor where users write long reviews of the businesses they've visited, it just pulls in the checkins you already have on hand - those from Facebook Places and Foursquare. Going forward, the app will integrate additional checkin sources, too, PathCrosser's creators Clark Harris and Matthew Simpson told me when I sat down with them this afternoon to see the new app in action.

What's more, PathCrosser plans to work with third-party APIs (application programming interfaces) to pull in other information that would be relevant, like your tips on Foursquare, for example, which could serve to augment the raw checkin data with your personal notes.

The fun part about using this app is that it can be a great conversation starter - bump phones with a friend and, all of sudden, not only do you see each other's travels by way of your checkin history, the app's matchmaking engine tells you whether or not you and your friend have similar tastes and interests.

Plus, for those who don't use location-based checkin services, PathCrosser provides (or rather, it will provide) a Web-based interface where you can pick out the places you've visited or mark them as places you would like to visit. However, that portion of the PathCrosser service has not launched just yet because this startup built "mobile first," as so many today choose to do.

For a first look at PathCrosser in action, check out the video below (sorry for the quality, I need a better camera):

PathCrosser is available here in the iTunes App Store or here in the Android Market.

Note: Video recorded with a Flip Cam, which was provided to me for use during SXSW.

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.

Inside every "where should I go?" question there are other big questions, like: What should I eat? What should I buy? What should I do with my leisure time plus expendable income? What should I do with my life? Foursquare would love to be a service that regularly answers those questions for millions of people.

It's a very ambitious goal. It's reminiscent of the question Google has answered, "What Web page should I look at for information about my interest?" As big as the Web is, though - the offline world is bigger, richer and can be more interesting. Win at recommendations offline and your Web application has really done something big.

Real-world place recommendations are higher risk (in terms of expense to the user who makes a purchase, the effort required and maybe social cost) but also much higher reward (in terms of lived experience gained and potential commercial activity) than online shopping or media consumption are. Can Foursquare get recommendations right and capture some of this huge potential?

What Foursquare Brings to the Table

Foursquare first began talking publicly about experiments with recommendation technologies six months ago. Three months ago the company posted a job opening for a data scientist, believed by observers to be someone who would focus on building out the recommendation technology.

Nearly two years after launching, the company now says it is fast approaching 7.5 million users and has recorded 500 million user check-ins. Foursquare doesn't disclose the number of venues it has indexed but one estimate is about 10 million bars, restaurants, parks, stores and other places across the world. If that number is accurate, that would mean there's been about 50 check-ins per venue on average. That sounds like a healthy little data set to analyze for recommendations.

Here's how the company said today that data will be put to use:

Factors Contributing to the New Foursquare Recommendations

1. Your history
2. Your friends' history
3. Your loyalty to your favorite places
4. Your favorite categories
5. Popular places across all users
6. What day of the week it is
7. The time of day a request is made
8. The quality of tips a place has
9. What topical experts have to say.

The idea is pretty simple: tell us what you're looking for and we'll help you find something nearby. The suggestions are based on a little bit of everything - the places you've been, the places your friends have visited, your loyalty to your favorite places, the categories and types of places you gravitate towards, what's popular with other users, the day of the week, places with great tips, the time of day, and so on. We'll even tell you why we think you should visit a certain place (e.g. popular with friends, similar to your favorite spots). You'll find it's helpful for general things like "food", "coffee", "nightlife" (we built in quick access to these searches) and you'll be surprised by what you get when searching for really specific things, like "80s music," "fireplaces," "pancakes," "bratwurst," and "romantic." The more random you get, the more interesting the results get (though be patient with this first release... sometimes we can't find every random thing).

And outside of the "Explore" tab, you'll see some of this thinking starting to surface on the "Me" tab as well. As we started to tinker with our recommendations algorithms, we started to see "expertise" starting to emerge from the data - we're seeing friends that have been to every karaoke place within 10 miles or tried every burger in Los Angeles. The new "Me" tab surfaces some of this, letting you seek guidance from your friends on the categories and places they explore most.

Now, with over half a billion data points, and with every additional check-in and every tip, foursquare gets a little smarter for you, your friends, and the rest of the community. We're already finding this can be just as helpful for finding a brunch spot in your neighborhood as it can be for helping you navigate a new city for the first time.

That sounds great, but the proof will be in the pudding of course. It's great to hear that this complicated problem is being approached with at least nine different factors taken into consideration. <(Above)!--end:nonyt--> Will businesses try to work those factors so that they will be recommended to more potential customers? That day may come.

A Design Challenge

With that many moving parts, there will be engineering challenges for Foursquare for sure - but the resulting experience is what will matter most. Users will be able to know right away if recommendations are for places they have been intrigued by or places they know already and dislike. It's going to take some finesse to really be compelling.

"Machine learning," wrote Joseph Reisinger in a recent blog post titled Why Generic Machine Learning Fails, "is not undifferentiated heavy lifting, it's not commoditizable like EC2, and closer to design than coding. The Netflix prize is a good example: the last 10% reduction in RMSE wasn't due to more powerful generic algorithms, but rather due to some very clever thinking about the structure of the problem; observations like 'people who rate a whole slew of movies at one time tend to be rating movies they saw a long time ago' from BellKor."

Will the Foursquare team be able to look at all the diverse kinds of data it has and thread the needle of the mobile, location-based, game-like, social experience in a way that means users look to it for recommendations of places to go in the offline world? Is this the feature that makes the millions of people who've looked at Foursquare and asked "what's the point?" reconsider their perception of an abscence of value?

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt said last summer. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

Google is far from the only company that will aim to solve that problem.

Foursquare 3.0 for iPhone and Android should be available for exploring starting late tonight.

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

Not Seeing It? Maybe You Have No Friends

If you're not seeing this on your Android phone yet, (and I'll admit, I wasn't at first), it could be because you have no friends. Well, no Hotpot friends that is. Even if you have a Google profile set up, or use Gmail and Google Contacts, even if you have taken the time to organize your friends into groups such as "Family," "Friends," "Work," etc., Google has not automatically added any of those people to your Hotpot friends list. You have to manually add people one-by-one.

To add friends, go to Hotpot's "Friends" section where you can scroll through your contact list or type in a friends' name or email address in the box provided. Doing so will auto-suggest entries from your address book, but it's not exactly the same as a search feature. (It's odd to me all the places where the world's number one search engine forgets to provide a true search feature in its products). Anyone you add will then be emailed an invite to join Hotpot.

I decided to not invite anyone to Hotpot, because I'm hesitant to spam friends and family with emails about new services. As a tech blogger, if I invited people to all the services I tried, I'm sure all emails from me would have soon been marked as spam. I wish you could just add friends, and then if they happened to sign up for Hotpot on their own, they would be prompted to accept your request. But I don't live in a dream world. That's not how things work.

Luckily, a few of my Internet buddies have added me to Hotpot already, so I could at least test out some of this new functionality. If I'm ever in the U.K. or San Francisco, I guess I'll know where to eat. Thanks, guys!

Photo of Hotpot, via Google blog post

Incremental Updates Could Make Hotpot Better, Quickly

Google Hotpot is clearly encroaching on Yelp's territory, and ramping up quickly. Even without a friend list in tow, I've been using Hotpot's recommendations via Maps on Android as well as Places, the standalone Android app that just shows restaurants, bars, attractions, gas stations, coffee shops, hotels and ATMs, plus any other search term you care to add. (Places recently came to the iPhone too, but as you may know, I've moved to the Nexus S for now.)

While the standalone app is great, Yelp works well as a standalone app, too. What will make people choose Hotpot? Integration with Google Maps, of course - Hotpot's killer feature. The Maps app is one of the most heavily used apps on Android (or any smartphone for that matter), and Google just launched a local recommendations service right within Maps itself. I'm betting that will work out well for Google, what do you think?

"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.

YouTube to Automate Topics Based On

• Your YouTube viewing history.
• Comments you've left on other videos.
• Types of sites linking to a video on YouTube.

"There are all these great gems inside YouTube that are not getting broader exposure," Palash Nandy, a search and discovery engineer at YouTube, told Shiels of the BBC.

"Take the sport of parkour [running through urban obstacle courses], this is a very particular sport that if exposed could become much more popular. There are all these random sports out there like cheese rolling or extreme ironing that no-one sees."

Extreme ironing? I've heard of riding lawnmower races, but extreme ironing seemed a bit much to me - until I saw that YouTube actually suggests refining that search to limit it to extreme ironing underwater or extreme ironing skydiving. What a world we live in!

It's not hard to imagine YouTube Topics on extreme ironing on YouTube LeanBack, on Google TV. Heck, controlled by the Android phone TV controller app.

Bring it on, YouTube Topics.

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.

Everyone's page looks a little different. I didn't think mine looked very personalized, until I looked at the page in my wife's account. (I was jealous of some of her recommendations.)

Recommendations are like the search you never knew you wanted to perform. If search engines defined, and funded, the last phase of the web - it seems quite likely that recommendation will play that role in the next phase of the web. All the more reason it's strange that a feature like this is being treated so casually by Facebook.

What Facebook Means When it Says You "Like" Something

What does it mean to "Like" something in Facebook? It's a simple action to take, but it means a whole lot.

• It means a user commits an act of brand evangelism, as the fact that they Liked what they did is broadcast out into the newsfeeds of all their friends.


• It means a user adds a link to that brand to their personal profile page, most likely forever. "Unliking" something is not made easy to do in the Facebook interface.


• Most important: To Like in Facebook parlance is to subscribe to updates from a publisher, indefinitely into the future. One click and updates from Britney Spears, or Radio Lab, appear side by side with baby pictures of your nieces and status updates from your Mom. And you just said you liked Britney Spears!

The Page Browser feature now gives you a continuously scrolling set of big pictures to reach out and click on. Click, click, click - subscribing to scores more feeds of updates from various publishers becomes easier than ever before.

It's a very potent addition to the site. It will be interesting to see how much it catches on and how much Facebook pushes it. Is it just me or is an infinite scrolling page of big, colorful icons you can just push on to receive a future stream of high-quality links, messages and other personalized content delivered almost directly into your brain... like, the greatest thing you could ask for online?

Will brands bid to have their pages recommended to users with various demographic and taste profiles? That's what Twitter is believed to be planning for user account recommendations on its site soon. We'll have to watch and see what Facebook does.

The Yahoo partner, which originally debuted back in fall of 2009, has consistently offered a useful service that digitizes "word of mouth" recommendations, allowing you to connect with friends who share your interests in order to find new apps. Now that process is even easier, thanks to the new website, its improved search engine an the new Android app.

The Android platform is growing fast - it's currently the top platform in the U.S and the third most popular in the world - and the number of applications housed in its official app marketplace has grown as well.

Recently, AndroidLib.com, a third-party Market tracker, reported that the number of Android apps available tops 100,000. Google disputes that number, however, saying that official count is actually closer to 70,000+ (the discrepancy being that AndroidLib counts all apps submitted, perhaps?). Regardless of the app-counting methodology, the increases in available Android applications have been dramatic. In February of this year, for example, the Android Market had 19,297 apps (according to Distimo), making it then the second largest and fastest-growing application store. Now, it has more than triple that number.

As any iPhone user will tell you, though, more is not necessarily better. It only makes finding the good apps harder to find. This is where Appolicious and similar recommendation services can help out.

The New AndroidApps.com

The newly revamped and rebranded AndroidApps.com (nice name, by the way) and mobile application introduces the social networking and recommendation features formerly available only to Apple device owners. Now visitors to the website will be able to access features like ratings, reviews, profiles, recommendations, the app library, and even curated app lists.

Thanks to the new site, I've already found several "new-to-me" Android apps to try: the receipt scanning/Foursquare mashup, Fourcash, the xkcd Reader app for the popular web comic and the bare-bones AutoFriend which apparently automatically accepts Facebook friend requests. (I'm going to download all three today - so don't count this as an official recommendation just yet.)

Also new on Appolicious is a federated search function which lets users search all three Appolicious properties - the Android site, the iPhone/iPad site and the newly launched Yahoo app site, which list all apps that run on the Yahoo platform, including Yahoo Pulse and the Yahoo front page.

According to Appolocious CEO Alan Warms, this news hints at Yahoo's continued interest in app discovery, the first being the original deal Yahoo did with his site to begin with. Yahoo is one of the only major players with no "dog in the fight" he says, when it comes to mobile. Will app discovery and recommendation engines be its way into this game? If so, that's not a bad business to be in, considering the number of apps today's mobile application stores house. Services that makes finding the good apps easier are definitely ventures worth taking note of.

"When we launched on the iPhone, we were genuinely shocked at the amount of requests for the Android version." GetGlue VP of Business Development Fraser Kelton told ReadWriteWeb. "The Android app is meant to be as close to the iPhone app's look and feel as possible, and we're happy to achieve that."

The startup hopes to eventually build apps for its users on other mobile platforms, like BlackBerry, webOS and Windows Phone 7. In the meantime, GetGlue is launching a mobile website optimized to provide much of the same experience of the apps to these users. From the mobile site, users can check-in, view a stream of their friends' activity and earn points and stickers regardless of which mobile OS they run.

GetGlue's point and sticker system, which closely mimics that of Foursquare's points and badges, is also receiving an update today with new partners and exclusive stickers. Among these are Barnes and Noble, HBO, Showtime and Internet TV network Revision3. Users can now earn stickers for popular shows like Weeds, new movies like Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and Revision3 shows and personalities like Veronica Belmont and Kevin Rose.

While the service has seen substantial growth since going mobile, it could face stiff competition in the near future. Hot Potato, a service with much of the same "check-in to anything" functionality, was recently acquired by Facebook. Now the social network giant is expected to make an announcement surrounding location as early as Wednesday. It wouldn't be surprising for Facebook to relaunch Hot Potato as a global check-in service working in conjunction with the site's new focus on "Likes."

Facebook's sheer size could spell trouble for GetGlue, but the startup's ace-in-the-hole could be its powerful recommendation engine, which Hot Potato lacks. As users check-in and like things on GetGlue, they are fed increasingly better recommendations based on their interests and those of their friends. This leads to more check-ins, creating a powerful feedback-loop for the service.

Exclusive deals and expansion to Android and other platforms via the mobile Web are smart steps for the startup as it attempts to position itself in front of the competition. However, only time will tell for services like GetGlue as the location and check-in landscape could dramatically change when Facebook undoubtedly enters it in the near future.

Taste-gathering startup Hunch is experimenting with a recommendation service that cross references social graph connections on other services with the large set of unusual questions its users have answered. Questions like "do you like facial hair on men? Yes? Well, 48% of our users have said that." The end result is a simple prototype website where you enter a city and your Twitter username and Hunch will show you Foursquare venues it thinks you'll like. Or at least it thinks that people on Hunch who are like your friends on Twitter tend to like those places, on Foursquare. Crazy? Maybe not.

Restaurant recommendations are just the beginning. Hunch knows a lot about a lot of people. The company recently said that the average Hunch user has answered 152 personal questions about themselves. Now that data and our corresponding friend connections are going to be the basis for personalized recommendations. Want to see how well the company thinks it understands you? Check out the recently launched Hunch Twitter predictor game. It's downright eerie.

Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon explained (vaguely) what's going on by email.

We developed the technology to project and propagate our taste data using graph-like connections via public APIs. In this case we propagate our taste profiles to Twitter by projecting the subset of Hunch users connected with twitter onto all Twitter
users. Then we propagate this taste data to Foursquare by projecting the subset of Twitter users checking in on foursquare onto all Foursquare venues. With our collection of taste profiles, in real time we can calculate affinities between any Hunch user, Twitter user, and Foursquare venue. As we project and propagate across all the web's entities, we will enable crazy data mashups. It's going to be cool!

In other words, if Hunch doesn't know about you well enough to make Foursquare recommendations via a Twitter account that's tied to both Foursquare and Hunch, then it will assume you are like those Twitter friends of yours who are on Hunch, and Foursquare.

That's the kind of data-driven value that making all these connections explicit will allow. The future will look like a big algorithm and interface war between companies battling it out to better serve you based on commonly, publicly available user data. Or data you selectively expose in return for recommendations.

Years after the untimely demise of Share Your OPML and available now, unlike the super feature rich but frozen in private beta service Toluu, Jonathan Christopher's SuggestRSS is easily worth the minimal effort it will take you to try out.

To use SuggestRSS, export your reading list from your feed reader and you'll get an OPML file on your desktop. Upload that file to the SuggestRSS website and it will do a simple comparison. People who like what you like also like these things you don't have. Simple as that. Amit Agarwal found and blogged about it first, among people we know.

You'll get some duplicates with the system, the sample size is small, it's dominated by tech feeds and not good for much yet with other niches. But you can come back to the URL of your recommendations later and find new suggestions!

That's it. There's nothing more to it. Now if you'll excuse me, I can't believe I had never thought to subscribe to the feed for Boston.com's Big Picture. It's really incredible photography and I appreciate SuggestRSS prodding me to subscribe.

During the last few months, BlogRize's founder Jesse Spaulding has been working on a major redesign of the site, which he is rolling out today. The new design features an enhanced voting system, updated ranking algorithms, and a lot of updates to the user interface that make using the site a lot easier and more fun.

BlogRize creates a community of readers around specific blogs and then generates an individualized Digg-like site for each community, where the ranking of the stories depends on the recommendations and votes of other group members (among other things). While you can submit stories to BlogRize directly, the main conduit through which users add stories to the system is through recommendations in Google Reader.

User Interface

A lot of the user interface updates to BlogRize are quite useful. You can now, for example, toggle story previews and see in-line comments from your friends right on your BlogRize homepage. This new version also allows you to quickly mark a story as read by simply clicking on the white space around the story.

On nice addition to BlogRize's feature set is its ability to find your profiles and activity on other sites through Google's Social Graph API. This makes importing your profiles a lot easier.

Most importantly, however, Spaulding has streamlined the voting system, which was one of our few complaints about the earlier version. Unlike Digg or Reddit, where you can only vote a story up or down, BlogRize allows you to mark a story as 'interesting,' 'funny,' 'disagree,' 'seen this already,' or 'inaccurate.' BlogRize also looks at links to stories from other blogs and takes these into account when it ranks its stories as well.

Join the RWW BlogRize Community

Jesse told us that his focus while developing and redesigning the service was on giving bloggers an opportunity to create and promote their own blog communities, and after this redesign, BlogRize has become an every better place for blog readers to get together in a relatively small but focused group. Thanks to this focus and the self-selection of the group members, the recommendations are always spot-on.

If you want to join the community of RWW readers on BlogRize, just click here and sign up for the service.

While it did take a bit of training before the application fully recognized our preferences and before it returned really good results, the overall results were very impressive.

So how does it work? When you first sign up, my6sense can import your RSS feeds (from Google Reader, Netvibes, MyYahoo, or from a standard OPML file). After that, all you have to do is read your feeds through the web app and my6sense will automatically learn from your reading behavior (my6sense calls this "digital intuition"). You can also explicitly give a 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' on any post.

My6sense is also a very capable RSS reader in its own right, with the built-in ability to share items on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn, as well as by email. One very nice feature of the app is that it also allows you to see comments on posts from supported blogging platforms.

Currently, my6sense is only available as a web app, but the company expects to have a native iPhone application in the App Store by the time the service launches its public beta early next year.

Training

On a mobile device, good recommendations can be quite a time saver. Having to scroll through numerous feeds can quickly become frustratingly slow. In our tests, it took a day or two of regular usage before my6sense started to come back with really good recommendations. As Kristie Wells, my6sense's VP of Marketing and Community Relations told us, the company is working on providing a better out-of-the-box experience that will learn faster, but given our positive experience, training the software off and on for a day or two is well worth it.

Attention

We also talked to the two co-founders of my6sense, Barak Hachamov and Avinoam Rubinstain, earlier last month and we asked them if they were going to support any of the open attention profiles like the APML, which would make it possible for users to take their attention profile and transfer it to other news readers. For now, however, the company says that it is focused on providing a good user experience for its alpha testers, though they didn't rule out support for the APML in the future.

Invites

Our experience with my6sense has been very positive, but you don't have to take our word for it. While the service is still in private alpha, they have provided us with 500 invites for our readers. Just click here to claim yours and let us know if it worked as well for you as it did for us.

Web Trends

RWW Live: Health 2.0

We have been tracking the so-called 'health 2.0' trend for some time now. We've covered the top health web apps, the trends to watch in health 2.0, and the latest industry stats. And we published a Health 2.0 update this week (see below). So in this week's episode of RWW Live, the ReadWriteWeb authors get together with a number of industry experts to discuss how the Web is changing health care.

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Health 2.0 Through the Eyes of a Diabetic - One Year Later

ReadWriteWeb founder/editor Richard MacManus: One year ago, I discovered that I had contracted Type 1 Diabetes. I was 36 at that point and it's relatively rare for someone of my age to suddenly get Type 1 Diabetes - indeed they used to call this form of diabetes "juvenile diabetes", because it mostly occurs in children. So it was quite a shock to discover that I had it! Immediately I looked to the Web to find out all I could about this condition. I discovered a thriving community of 'health 2.0' apps and social networks, which I then wrote about in this blog.

As it's now a year later, I thought it'd be good to review health 2.0. What has changed in web-based health services over the past year? And indeed what web tools do I use to help me manage diabetes?

Nine Recommendation Tools We Wish We Had

...And The Best Substitutes We've Come Up With So Far

There's so much content online every day that it's totally overwhelming. That's where good recommendation technologies and media outlets come in handy. As a blog that seeks to share the most interesting web technology and trends with readers, automated help with the discovery process is of great interest to us. In this post, we discuss some tools we wish we had and the closest makeshift substitutes we've been able to come up with. Maybe you'll find some of them useful or have even better recommendations to offer us and other readers.

2009 Tips for Big Web Companies

2009 is approaching quickly, and the consensus is that it's going to be a really tough year. The US financial crisis is triggering a global recession. Yet, a crisis is also a time full of hope. It is a time to re-think, re-tool, and get ready for the next upswing.

For big Internet companies, 2009 is going to be a very bad year for sure. Advertising profits are going to plunge, and consumers will spend less money overall, particularly on the web. There is little that can be done to change that. But what big companies can do is invest in innovation and killer moves that will bear fruit in the years to follow. Here is what we think would be cool for various big web companies to do in 2009.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mindmeister is an online mind mapping tool.
• Pro Opinion allows you to get paid to take surveys.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Glue enables you to connect with friends while browsing.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• Direct Media Exchange is a solution for managing ad networks.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
• Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

RWW Jobwire

Who's Getting Hired in Tech? Last Week's Jobwire Graphs

We all know the economy is in shambles and there are massive layoffs across most industries, including technology - but there are still new hires happening in tech and new media! Who's getting hired? That's what we're tracking at our blog Jobwire - the stories of lucky people with exciting new jobs.

Who's getting those jobs? What kinds of positions are being filled and in what sectors? Check out our first set of charts below from last week's aggregate activity on Jobwire to find out the answer to those questions.

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB'S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Products

Google SearchWiki is Not a Wiki

Late last week Google unveiled the first major change to its search interface since the introduction of multi-media ("Universal") results into the search results page. They called it Google SearchWiki.

It's a big deal, it's awkward, it's frightening, it's brave, it's already both loved and hated - but it's not a wiki. As Ward Cunningham, the man who invented wikis, told us in our initial coverage of SearchWiki, "Collectively editing thoughts is what leads to the unique wiki behavior..." Days into the experiment it's clear that this feature is more like a forum, and it's not a particularly well architected one at that.

Your Favorite Mobile Web Apps & Sites

One year ago we ran a contest asking you to tell us your favorite Mobile Web apps. From the resulting comments there were 5 Mobile Web apps that clearly stood out, with multiple mentions: Gmail Java app for mobile phone, Google Maps for Mobile, Opera Mini, Fring, Shozu.

Well, a lot has changed in the Mobile Web application world since then. The Apple App Store launched in July '08, prompting a wave of new third party iPhone apps. And we've seen innovation from Apple's mobile phone competitors: Google's Android (which has multiple app stores), Nokia, and Blackberry, and others. So what are your favorite Mobile Web apps and sites circa November 2008? The ReadWriteWeb authors listed their faves, plus we polled our friends in Twitter (subscribe to our Twitter account @rww).

Firefox China Edition: Everything a Local Browser Should Be

Did you know that the way you surf the internet may be influenced by your culture? In the U.S. and Europe, web surfers are leaning forward, one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard, typing and mousing equally. In China, however, the process is much different. Web surfers there tend to lean back from the monitor while keeping one hand on the mouse, the other hand dangling. The keyboard is used much less frequently as much of the navigation is done with clicks instead.

YouTube: More to Love

As the prices of professional quality video equipment continue to drop and the number of people with high-speed internet connections continues to increase, online video sites have been scrambling to keep up with their users' desires to deliver higher quality content to their viewers.

YouTube is no different. This week, they announced the latest enhancement to the YouTube platform - a widescreen video format across the site - which they hope will provide users with "a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience."

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

Is SaaS Cheaper Than Licensed Software?

Most people quickly answer this question in the affirmative. We certainly do. However, there are people out there who aren't sure. They look at the monthly cost of a SaaS application and compare it to the equivalent licensed product over an extended period of time. Given enough time, you will eventually hit a point when the SaaS product appears to be more expensive. In this post we looked at it from the perspective of the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.