In case you haven’t noticed it yet, there’s a recommendation industry emerging which offers its services for “free” in exchange for your privacy. Share your web apps on Wakoopa, see on which site you waste time at 8aweek, and give away your playlist at Last.fm. I use or used all of these services, they’ve proven to be of great value. Yet I don’t have anything anymore that comes close to privacy. For that matter, I might start using Glue as well.
With Glue, you can see what your friends thought of the books, music, movies, wines, restaurants, gadgets, stocks, actors and tv shows you browse along. A toolbar pops up, and by clicking on a friend’s name, you can tell what they thought of it. Here’s a video explaining how Glue works:
This product by AdaptiveBlue might be of use for people who shop online a lot. As a true web geek, I get most of my friend’s recommendations via Twitter, blogs, or services like Last.fm. But apart from the privacy, it doesn’t hurt me to give Glue a spin as well. The only challenge here, is a familiar one: I’ll have to persuade my friends to start using it as well. If only they wouldn’t use Internet Explorer…
Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time we’re interviewing Scott Wheeler and Valentin Hussong, co-founders of Berlin-based start-up Directed Edge. They provide web sites with a recommender system. Basically they serve three different types of sites, namely social networks, stores, and informational sites. Wheller and Hussong are now ready to conquer the world with their products and currently looking for a web applications and infrastructure expert and a marketing kinda guy. Exciting times. How did they get to this stage?
How did you come up with the idea of Directed Edge?
“Many years back Scott was doing some work on desktop search. Desktop search tends to not produce nearly as relevant results as web search algorithms because it’s basically using technology from the mid-90s. The critical moment in the modernization of web search was a shift from looking at text and tags and stuff like that to looking at how information is connected. So he was really interested in figuring out how to model connected data and use that to find related content.
If we fast-foward a few years, there was this “ah-ha” moment after watching movies suggested by IMDB as related to Scott’s favorite movie and being blown away by how horrible the recommendations were. So the pieces started dropping into place — recommendations are a huge part of modern web sites, combined with the rise of social media, there was a chance to use the social web’s structure to find content users are interested in. We started pitching the idea of doing recommendations as a service to some of our friends in the local web community and they helped us — and continue to help us — refine the idea.” (more…)
While we’ve already been waiting nine months for the new Delicious to arrive, the service still seems to be the standard in social bookmarking. I can see why, as Delicious is a robust tool that does the job and thousands of people – maybe millions – have their treasure room of valuable links there. Google Reader and Wordpress integration does the rest. So while Arrington still complains about the silence from Yahoo’s side, web services keep building Delicious mash-ups. One of the latest examples – called inSuggest - seems particularly useful, as it recommends new bookmarks on the bases of your existing ones.
Filtering by tags
After typing in the Delicious username, inSuggest presents five recommendations per page. I was surprised by the good results, inSuggest even knows how to manage my Dutch bookmarks. The interface is dark and shiny, the navigation works smoothly. One of the most useful features is the possibility to filter the recommendations per tags. When I first entered my username, inSuggest came up with a bunch of CSS sites, based on my bookmarks from a year ago – when I was a web designer. My interests lie somewhere else now, so I managed to get some better recommendations by clicking my ‘blogging’ tag.
No-nonsense approach
This Swedish service certainly contributes something to the social bookmarking field, as it offers a refreshing approach. In a time where every service seems to recommend new sites on the bases of linking you to “like-minded” people – often leading to vague results, this no-nonsense approach is a welcome alternative.
A brand new music service has just launched an open beta version: Guitarati. Yes, yet another new music service, but wait, this one has a totally different approach then existing music start-ups. Founder Sonal Pandey explained me in an email that the world of music discovery is dominated by tag clouds and rating systems, yet they don’t have anything to do with ‘feelings’ about music. According to Pandey, Chicago-based and self funded Guitarati has found an intuitive way of music discovery based on music-color co-relation. And it looks like this:
Click on the color that you feel it represents your mood and Guitarati offers you a list of songs. Within this screen, you can either choose a lighter or darker tone. When it gets too new-age for you, just pick a familiar genre.
The business model is more down to earth, as users can listen to a high quality full-length song stream for a cent, and these cents get deducted from the download price – which is determined by the artist – when they download the song. 75% of the earnings go to the musicians and their label.
So the barrier for uploading your own music is pretty low, though I’m not sure people can get used to this new way of picking music. What does a yellow song mean? And what’s the difference with pink? Moreover, I believe every culture has different associations with colors. When western people are in a love mood, they might go for red. But will Asians as well? I wonder how this will develop. One thing is for sure, it’s really interesting to see how the lists of songs for a color will change when more people from all over the world will rate the music.
The biggest challenge for the Guitarati team will be to prove its users they’re not just a gimmick, but a serious way of finding music. Maybe they could get a music star to write a testimonial?
Written on 3rd November 2008
1 COMMENT 
“Many years back Scott was doing some work on desktop search. Desktop search tends to not produce nearly as relevant results as web search algorithms because it’s basically using technology from the mid-90s. The critical moment in the modernization of web search was a shift from looking at text and tags and stuff like that to looking at how information is connected. So he was really interested in figuring out how to model connected data and use that to find related content.
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