Snoox, a new online service built around recommendations from only your closest friends, has opened its website to the public today.
The service is notable because it restricts exactly who can give you recommendations. Rather than asking countless strangers to vote or rate on any number of products – which often creates a mass of noise that is difficult to decipher – Snoox wants to keep it to only your most important peers. These are the people who you trust and know what your interests are, after all.
“We all have our go-to friends who we ask for advice in real life, which was the inspiration behind Snoox,” Guy Poreh, Founder of Snoox said. “You would no sooner stand in the middle of a subway car and ask a group of strangers for a recommendation for the best Italian restaurant in Manhattan, expecting a response that you can trust.”
So, Snoox only asks that users write endorsements for products and services that they’ve actually experienced or would recommend in real life. To begin with, users join Snoox by connecting their Facebook account. The website then pulls every page the user has liked, instantly creating a list of places and objects that they might want to recommend.
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A simple tick sheet means that you can filter exactly what you would like to suggest – particularly useful for some of those old or ‘hilarious’ Facebook pages that you may have liked in the past – and then start writing a simple description for why your friends should check it out.
The process is a little long and arduous, but once you’re finished you’ll be left with a profile page that looks lively and is brimming with content. Recommendations can also be grouped on your profile as “displays”, which work in a similar way to boards on Pinterest. It’s a useful, if simplistic way of grouping your interests for other people to look at.
The search functionality in Snoox is pretty robust, allowing you to search either through existing Facebook friends who have connected through the service, or via the wider Snoox community. If you don’t know anyone else registered to the service it can feel a little lonely at the times, so the email invitations at the start of the registration process are vital for making the website useful.
When you want to post a new recommendation, Snoox is also incredibly quick at finding images, links and product information for you to access. It also means that once you’ve been recommended a product or service, it’s easy to just hit the “Get it now” button and be whisked away to wherever the purchase needs to be made.
Snoox is currently available only on the web and as a Facebook app, although the company has emphasized that other platforms will soon follow. It has been developed as part of Project Krypto, an early-stage technology venture led by executives from the digitial advertising, new media and consumer technology industries.
Snoox’s emphasis on personal, written recommendations helps it stand out against the endless sea of Yelp, TripAdvisor and Amazon user reviews.
Image Credit: Snoox
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