In a world more swamped with content options every day, recommendation technology is poised to make a huge difference in our experience online. We identified recommendation tech as one of the 5 most important trends for 2008 but we may have jumped the gun just a little bit. Below is a quick profile of each of the five Strands finalists working to bring more of this paradigm into the present market, followed by our thoughts on which one we're most interested in.

Gravity R&D

Sentimetrix is another four person team, this one from the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Sciences. This startup analyzes text content around the web and "has automated sentiment extraction/analysis/scoring, the ability to find and quantify opinions in text." If this kind of technology is of interest to you, see also our review yesterday of the new BooRah API.

iletken is a mysterious project built by four Turkish college students at Koc University. It balances personal and social behavior to recommend advertisements "based on relevance."

Reccoon is a stealth project built by Peter Tegelaar and Dominiek ter Heide in the Netherlands. Ter Heide also worked on the Japanese social learning platform iKnow, which launched an API yesterday. Recoon appears to use the iPhone's GPS, user attention data like Last.fm listening history and the GeoNames reverse lookup API to notify you when you're near the location of an event you might like to participate in.

Commendo is a four person team from two universities in Austria. Team Commendo is both the Grand Prize winner and in first place for the Progress Prize in the Netflix Prize leaderboard.

Strands describes Commendo like this: "Commendo uses recommendation technologies to optimize the drug design process in the pharmaceutical industry, including speeding up drug development and the minimization of adverse drug reactions."

Our Take

All of these sound interesting but the one we're most excited to learn more about is Commendo, the pharmaceutical drug development recommendation engine. We're dubious about the political and economic world of big pharma, but we love innovation and that's a field where there's enough money and science on the line that there's a premium put on magic. Strands has products for all kinds of industries (we think their banking service is the coolest) but we'd love to see what Strands plus the Netflix Prize champs Commendo can do in pharma research.

Will Any of These Make a Difference?

Could these startups change the world? With a little bit of funding and possible acquisition by Strands, they could. Strands has customers around the world in everything from music to banking and mobile. They have a lifestreaming service, ala FriendFeed, that doesn't seem to be going anywhere yet, but getting backing from Strands is a great step for any little recommendation startup.

Bring on a smart future augmented by powerful recommendation technology!

Disclosure: Strands is an RWW sponsor. We'd have written about recommendation startups anyway, though, because we think they're really cool.

Communication works better when you have a good idea who it is you're talking to. How can new online services get users to describe themselves, though?

LinkedIn = Boring but Effective

One of the most well known ways to get people to fill out their profiles is the way LinkedIn does it. Users are shown a progress bar and told that their profile is "X% completed." This is probably effective but some people tell us it makes them feel guilty.

It's much better than nothing, but let's look at some more creative and fun solutions.

What's Your Most Common Username Elsewhere?

Personal search engine Lijit does a great job of making it easy to associate your account with them with all kinds of other accounts you own around the web. It's simple: they just ask what your most common username is and then they check for public profiles with that username on a long list of different services. In just moments, with a handful of keystrokes, all kinds of info about you can be gathered together.

It's the first step new users take when they click the button to register on the site. You can exclude certain accounts, add particular usernames for accounts where you use a different one. It's incredibly elegant and a great model that others would do well to emulate.

We suspect that social media ping server Gnip will make this kind of approach all the more powerful and easy for application developers to implement soon.

Once you've got usernames from these services, why not display recent activity feeds on their profile pages? That's kind of how Jive Software's ClearSpace does it (see image on the left) and we think that looks great.

Did You Know...?

Another interesting approach is to offer users information about the activities of other people in aggregate and use this as an opportunity to prompt them to provide more information about themselves.

Social recommendation service (and, disclosure, RWW sponsor) Strands, for example, presents customers of Spanish bank BBVA with messages like the following: "Grocery spending: A married person spends 103% more on groceries than a single person. By the way, are you married or single?" That's interesting to know and would motivate me to answer the question with a click.

How else could this be done? Check out categorized Twitter directory Twellow, where Twitter user bios are categorized by interest and occupation. It's a great way to find like minded Twitter users, but imagine if Twello (or another app) said something like this to users: "We see that you are an accountant - did you know that Twitter users who are accountants tend to post more photos to Flickr than Doctors do, but fewer than people in Defense related fields do? If you'd like to tell us what your Flickr username is, we'll connect it to your Twitter account here."

Maybe it could be done more elegantly than that, but you get the idea.

Similarly, eco-credit card company Brighter Planet tracks your personal ecological impact but starts each user out with the median numbers for people in their geographic area and works backwards.

Messages like the following greet users when they login to their Brighter Planet account: "You live with one other person and you use 15% green electricity. Improve your profile by telling us about the car you drive and your flights."

You Look Like George Bush

Brand spanking new social news site SocialMedian assigns a big picture of a famous (or infamous) person as each new user's avatar. My default profile was graced with a photo of Bill Gates, but other people start out with George Bush - something that must get a lot of new users to click the "change my photo" link. It's a witty idea and we wonder just how far it could be taken.

"You are 15 years old, clean up after circus animals for a living and love Britney Spears videos on TV. (unverified - not true? click here to edit your profile.)" Oh yeah, that could work.

I Heard About You On Twitter

If you've used red hot social lifestreaming app type thing FriendFeed, you've probably wondered why, with everything the service knows about you, there's no place to see bio info about other users on their FriendFeed user pages. Enter Hao Chen's FriendFeed Profile script for Greasemonkey. Every time you visit a the user page on FriendFeed of someone who has associated their Twitter account with their FF account (everyone) - this script grabs their bio info from Twitter and slaps it up on their FriendFeed page. It's fantastic!

Why not let users of your app opt-in to populate their profiles with publicly available profiles from other accounts? (I'm here on FriendFeed by the way, if you'd like me to feed you like a friend.)

Still More Ways to Do It

OpenID accounts usually have some profile info associated with them. Some apps pull that info. The OpenID community is working hard, if slow, on "attribute exchange" - a protocol that would flesh this out all the more.

MyBlogLog is a widely used social network for blog readers where you can find headshots of millions of people, their demographic info, interests and many associated accounts from other social networks. Have you tried out the BlogJuice bookmarklet to see the job titles or your blog's most recent visitors, via LinkedIn? It's SO much fun!

If you don't mind renting users from Facebook, the new Facebook Connect login and profile system looks pretty hot too. For some reason people don't appear to put as much fake info about themselves into Facebook as they do other places - it's a rich source of user profile data and comes with the added comfort of extensive privacy controls. The downside is that putting this much control in the hands of Facebook is pretty creepy.

Conclusion: It Doesn't Have to Be Hard Anymore

There's not a whole lot of excuses any more for asking users of your brand new website to fill in a whole lot of information about themselves. Nor is there for having super anemic user profiles, which leave new users totally uninspired to connect with each other. You need users connecting as quickly as possible in your apps and rich profiles really help.

What other ways have you seen apps solve this problem? We're sure there are many more creative examples and we'd love to find out about them!

The handsome devil at the top of this post is Flickr user thomas pix.

Customers of Spanish bank BBVA will now be offered recommended products and services, individual and anonymized aggregate analytics and personalized goal setting and alert services, all based on their banking activities.

What's Interesting About This Deal?

Using the Strands Social Recommender technology, BBVA will be able to offer intelligent observations and suggestions for personal finance. A demo of the product shows, for example, that users of the system might be given interesting statistics about the financial activities of people in a particular demographic group, then asked whether they belong to that group. It's like having a private, personal, math-powered financial adviser available for your use on demand.

With interfaces for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Nokia phones - analytics and recommendations will also be available outside of the desktop web browser. This is the kind of heavyweight application to see coming from online recommendation services.

Privacy Concerns

How will bank customers feel about having their personal and financial details thrown into the collective pot for analysis of recommendations to other customers? We think it may take some getting used to, but that kind of information is undoubtedly being aggregated inside of banks already. The prospect of allowing users to benefit directly from their collective data is an appealing one.

Will the recommendations offered all point crudely toward buying more services from the bank? Given the huge war chest that Strands commands and the caliber of hires they've made over the last year, we hope that the company's banking recommendations and observations will prove truly useful and engaging for customers and not just for the bank's bottom line.

Only time will tell, but we've said for some time that in a world drowning in data - powerful recommendation technologies that help point towards personally meaningful information have huge potential. Financial services are the next frontier for these experimental technologies and we hope that Strands will disclose statistics in time demonstrating the impact their service had on the financial lives of users around Europe.

Disclosure: Strands is a RWW sponsor.

Google Gears Turns One: Future is in Open Standards

Google Gears, the offline web application API it debuted last year at its developer conference, turned one this week. To celebrate, Google dropped the company name from Gears. The name change is a symbolic move aimed at reinforcing Google's commitment to working with existing standards communities and helping them to define better open standards for bridging online applications and the offline world.

See also: Google App Engine Announces Pricing Plan, APIs, Open Access; Why Google is Wooing Web Developers

The Ultimate Yahoo! Pipes Creations List

Yahoo! Pipes is one of the coolest ways to mashup the RSS feeds of various sites and sources to get the data you want. Since our initial coverage of Yahoo! Pipes, thousands of creations are now available. However, finding the best picks can be tough. ReadWriteWeb has done the hardest part and comprised a list of some of the best Yahoo Pipes created by users. We give you the ultimate Yahoo! Pipes list.

Strands Lifestreaming: What They're Doing and Invites for Readers

Recommendation service Strands.com launched a lifestreaming service this week that aims to pull together the company's wide range of services in particular media and online activity into one central place for users to share socially. The new Strands is a way to share your music, bookmarks, blog posts and other activity with friends, family and groups. It's a major entry into one of the most interesting sectors of the new web. We give it a mixed review...

See also: Recommendation and RSS: A Look at Two Readers Filtering the Noise

Semantic Tagging with Faviki

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki's suggestions don't just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

Freebase: Dispelling The Skepticism

Freebase, the first product of semantic web company Metaweb, is an open, semantically marked up database of information that we called one of the "10 semantic apps to watch" last year. With $57.4 million in funding, a smart team, and a tech legend in Danny Hillis at the helm, Metaweb is considered to be one of the most serious players in the Semantic Web space. Yet the company's efforts to date have been met with skepticism. Particularly, people have asked how is Freebase different to Wikipedia? Jamie Taylor, the Minister of Information at Metaweb, spoke at the SemTech 2008 Conference that took place in San Jose last week in an effort to dispel some of that skepticism.

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality

For a few years now people have been talking about semantic search. Any technology that stands a chance to dethrone Google is of great interest to all of us, particularly one that takes advantage of long-awaited and much-hyped semantic technologies. But no matter how much progress has been made, most of us are still underwhelmed by the results. In head-to-head comparisons with Google, the results have not come out much different. What are we doing wrong?

See also: Making the Web Searchable: The Story of SearchMonkey

Android Is Out For iPhone Blood

Wednesday, at Google's I/O Event, the company demonstrated their Android prototype phone, a device which has been greatly improved since its last public outing at this year's CES and Mobile World conferences. Today, Android looks classy enough that you half-expected them to pull a Steve Jobs and announce that you could run out and buy it right now. During the demo, the company showed off some of the applications that will run on Android - like a Google Maps Street View app that drew cheers from the crowd. From the buzz surrounding the Google Phone at this event, it's clear that Android has a shot at knocking that other touchscreen phone off its pedestal.

See also: Google's Android: How Will it Compare to iPhone?

The Social Networking Arms Race

Last November, when Google launched Open Social we asked readers if Facebook would join Google's platform. The results were split right down the middle, but as we get farther from the Open Social launch, and the two sites continue to launch competing APIs (Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect, for example -- the former banned by Facebook), that seems less and less likely. This is becoming a social networking cold war.

See also: How Many Friends is Too Many?

The Fork in the Road for Social Media

Social networking is at a major fork in the road. Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for your connections (aka the social graph), but with this data available via open APIs to anybody who needs it. That is a utility type model, and as with any utility, it can be hugely valuable at scale.

See also: Sometimes Crowds Aren't That Wise

Who Are The "Digitally Savvy?"

A new report put about by consumer and media research firm Scarborough Research has revealed some interesting information about the section of the U.S. population that's being called the "digitally savvy." These are the consumers who are more likely to own high-tech items like DVRs, satellite radios, and VoIP phones and are more likely to engage in Internet activities that include blogging, downloading music, and other web 2.0 activities. In other words - they're us.

See also: When User-Generated Content Goes Bad

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

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

The Best Things About Strands

Incorporating a Wide Range of Services

Good lifestreaming apps are more than just RSS aggregators. Leading competitor FriendFeed excells in user experience, the super busy people at Profilactic add support for more services than you can imagine every week.

Strands is differentiated by its incorporation of the companies wide range of properties. The desktop iTunes tracker and song recommendation service is folded into Strands.com seamlessly. The company's several recent acquisitions of small but innovative online financial services should really be remarkable once those are integrated. Strands' mobile services like Party Strands, a social jukebox in use at clubs around Europe, will be a lot of fun to see integrated into the product.

Great Granular Control of Content Subscriptions

Strands makes it easy to unsubscribe to a user's Twitter updates, or music recommendations, with a single click. There are little features like the ability to subscribe to comments other users leave on a particular item that are very nice. Filtering by media type is much easier on Strands than it is on FriendFeed, for example.

Groups Functionality is Very Nice

It's relatively easy to assign friends to one or more groups, like co-workers, college friends or people interested in a particular type of technology. You can limit the sharing of some items with just selected groups and you can view what's newest or hottest in any single group. This is the kind of feature that will facilitate the mainstreaming of Strands. My family, for example, probably doesn't want to see every Twitter message I post - but I'd love to be able to shoot them one photo or another and have that appear in their desktop Strands viewer.

Hotness is the Hotness

While the recommendation features won't be applied beyond iTunes music until the next release of strands, right now you can view what the hottest items are in your whole circle of friends, in a particular group of friends or in the lifestream of one particular friend. When discovering a new person, for example, it's very cool to see not just the most recent items they've shared but also the items that their friends were most responsive to. Hotness on these different levels is huge and really helps overcome some of the challenges of the time-bound rush of a lifestreaming river.

It Looks Great

Strands has talented designers who have made the application very easy on the eyes throughout the service. That makes a really big difference, especially for non-early adopters.

Problems Strands Still Faces

Initial Experience Slow

Right now, you've really got to want to give Strands a fair trial if you're going to get anything out of it. While FriendFeed has an awesome friend recommendation feature that churns up person after person that you might like to follow, making it easily to immediately get a full experience of the service, that's not the case with Strands. Friend discovery is far more cumbersome than it should be. In an hour of testing I've only got 7 friends and that's ridiculous. Fortunately one of them (I'm looking at you, Turoczy) is a web app fiend. If that weren't the case then Strands would feel like a ghost town to me.

Likewise, every application should look at how Lijit performs the discovery of your various activity streams around the web. If everyone would just do it like they do then this whole sector would move ahead much faster.

Site Navigation Weak

Navigation through these rivers of information needs to be smooth. FriendFeed feels smooth, good 3rd party Twitter apps feel good to use. Strands requires far too many clicks to accomplish too little.

Users Want More

Presumably it's only a matter of time until there's a Strands mobile version. People are already asking for one and hopefully it will work better than Twitter or FriendFeed on mobile. Comments are delivered by email but it would be nice to be able to post them as replies by email as well. There doesn't appear to be any data export available yet. Hopefully it won't just be abstracted taste data that you can export in time. Finally, Strands.com needs an API. No matter how well funded and staffed a company is (and Strands has brilliant employees working in Oregon, New York, Spain and San Francisco) there's no way that one company can come up with the kinds of features and user experiences that a world of creative developers can.

Conclusion and Invites

For a just released beta product, Strands is very promising. The obstacles it faces are not small, however. If you'd like to give it a try, go to Strands.com, click on the main service link of the far left and then enter invite code "RWW." The first 100 people who do so will get in. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

If Lifestreaming apps are of interest to you, and they sure are of interest to us, check out the LifestreamBlog.com for a daily dose of in depth news about even the most obscure competitors that Strands will face in this crowded field.

Some companies just blog about updates to their own technology and that's good for existing users to see. Others are fun to read whether you're a user or not. Here are some of the company blogs we recommend reading for a good time.

You can't talk about interesting company blogs without mentioning Signal vs. Noise, the wildly successful blog about design, usability and small business from the makers of project management service Basecamp. This blog could easily stand on its own as compelling reading even if there wasn't a company behind it selling services. Sure enough, it's even got an ad on it from the elite boutique ad network The Deck. Signal vs. Noise has 88k subscribers - making it fun and educational for those subscribers is great for the business of 37signals.

Ning

Ning powers niche social networks and the company's blog is a great place to find out about all kinds of groups that are actively using this technology. Some of them a real surprise. The International Society of Space Entreprenuers, the Eat Local Foods Coalition of Maine and the ASPCA Book Club all have social networks! Who knew? Now how about some data portability, Ning? If you want to read about the theoretical side of niche social networks, check out data portability lovin' competitor PeopleAggregator's blog, written by the company's prolific CEO Marc Canter.

Viddler

Viddler is a crazy feature rich video hosting service with a very good blog. In addition to feature announcements, the company posts a wide variety of videos that are interesting to watch. That's where I discovered this one below, for example.

Newsgator

RSS company Newsgator has a great blog about RSS use cases, data portability debates and other industry topics. Maybe I'm just an RSS head - but I really enjoy their blogging. Newsgator competitor Attensa also has a very good blog about all things RSS - but it sure could use some more updates!

A.viary

Collaborative design tool A.viary has a couple of very good blogs. Their idea blog is full of interesting content that regularly hits the front page of digg. These folks have some seriously juvenile gender issues going on, which I have given them a hard time about before, but their blog is still fun to read otherwise. Every post they put up is worth a look.

Adaptive Path

User experience and design firm Adaptive Path publishes a very thought provoking blog. I usually scan company blogs for announcements and videos - but their longer posts often convince me to stop and read. OLPC: The Beauty of Failure and Greedy Mobile Interfaces? I'll stop and read posts with titles like that.

Amazon Web Services

What could be more dreary than commoditized data processing and storage services? While that might sound boring, the AWS Blog does a great job of highlighting cool things that are done on top of Amazon Web Services. Lately they've put up posts about how AWS are being used by the New York Times to provide online access to 150 years of archives and by the little ShareThis widget that you've probably seen on hundreds of thousands of blogs around the web. Lots of charts, graphs and other fun stuff for nerds on this blog.

Strands

Here at RWW we've been following the mega-funded recommendation service Strands for several years. We find what they do fascinating. Their company blog is mostly about company announcements, but they have really interesting announcements. Last.fm on Nokia phones? Cool! The most interesting section of their blog though is the data portability category and throughout the blog you'll find some really deep thoughts on cutting edge innovation.

Articulate

Articulate is a an e-learning tools company with a very popular blog. More than 20,000 subscribers actively discuss topics like how to make a good screencast and how best to work with clip art. This was a new one to me but I've already enjoyed spending some time on this company's blog. What more could you ask from a company blog? Good content creates a community of advocates that share the blog with friends, some of whom undoubtedly will purchase the company's products.

These Are But a Few

There really are a fair number of interesting company blogs around the web. We'd love to hear about some of your favorites. Others that are worth checking out include Oracle Apps Lab for a fun discussion of web 2.0 in the enterprise, the Lijit blog on "searching the social graph" and the many fun blogs published by Adobe.

If you found this post of interest, you might enjoy reading our coverage of some of the top new social media company evangelists as well.

We hope you find some of these blogs worth subscribing to and we'd love to learn about other blogs that cover topics of general interest that even non-customers would enjoy reading.

Strands currently has 150 employees and it sees 2008 as "our year to market". Strands told ReadWriteWeb that it plans to ultimately apply its recommendation technologies to 3 areas:

1. Business solutions - helping people find content in a client site
2. Social media - Strands says it will soon launch services "to help people discover things they might like, based on their online behavior" and "help them make sense of all their dispersed social media activities"
3. Personal finance - helping people consolidate their dispersed financial data, and helping them find new ways to save money and invest.

Strands sees these three areas as having "strong personalization challenges."

moneyStrands + Expensr

The personal finance part is what is being announced today. Currently in private beta testing, moneyStrands is "an online money management solution that allows users to aggregate their online financial information in one place, providing them with an instant snapshot of all their finances." Similar products on the market today include Wesabe, Mint and a kiwi startup with global ambitions called Xero. moneyStrands is employing recommendations technologies, such as enabling users to anonymously compare themselves to others with similar traits - e.g. demographics.

Expensr, the app Strands has acquired, is a free online application that combines social networking with financial management. There is no word yet on whether Expensr will be integrated into moneyStrands; and if so how. As of now it will continue to run as a separate service.

Conclusion

As we've noted before, we at ReadWriteWeb are following the trend of recommendations closely - it was one of the 5 major trends we outlined in our toolkit for 2008 and was featured in my Media08 presentation Web Tech Trends for 2008 and Beyond. Strands continues to pique our interest, but let us know in the comments what other recommendation startups we should be looking at too.