LoveThis: get recommendations from people you trust

If you’ve ever looked for recommendations on what restaurant to eat at, which hotel to visit or perhaps which book to read, there’s no shortage of options online.

A few carefully chosen key terms entered into the search engine that is Google will probably churn up a wealth of reviews and suggestions for you to choose from. Heck, you can even ping-out a status update on Facebook or Twitter asking your legion of followers and friends for their input.

Since beta launch back in March this year, LoveThis.com has tapped into the human desire to get peer feedback before committing hard cash to a given product or activity. At the time of writing, over 20,000 reviews have already been added to the LoveThis.com website and it’s growing each day.

LoveThis.com sells itself as the place to find the things your friends and people you trust recommend. And today, it has announced its first partnerships with a number of well-known brands, such as BBC Worldwide, The Guardian, IDG, The Telegraph, Wall St Journal, Mr & Mrs Smith, Good Pub Guide, City AM, The Irish Times, Handbag.com and more.

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The partnerships will enable users to save recommendations from trusted media brands in one place, and share them with their friends:

The premise is that each publisher shares its content through LoveThis.com, allowing consumers to save reviews on everything from hotels and food to beauty products, and share them with friends they choose from their existing email, Facebook and Twitter contacts. It’s a private service, so users will always know the person who has recommended each item, and only your friends can see what you like.

The platform also lets you save your own recommendations on anything from hotels and websites to plumbers and books, and share this information with your friends:

Once you’ve found the ‘item’ you want to share, you simply enter individual friends or groups of friends from across your social sphere:

“Every day publishers provide hundreds of high quality reviews for their readers. They invest heavily in trusted journalists trying the best places and products, and in publishing them across print, mobile and the web. Readers would like to remember them, but unless they cut them out or bookmark hundreds of web pages, they get lost. Now, if I see a great B&B, or a recipe, or a book review, I can simply click it and save it in one place. Every time you then log-on to LoveThis.com it will show you the latest recommendations from the publishers you follow”.

Dormandy also analogizes the concept of trusting a random person on the street with a recommendation with trusting an anonymous contributor on the Web, asking why should people trust people they don’t know online with reviews? He says:

“LoveThis.com overcomes that by bringing the recommendations of the friends and journalists you trust, together in one place.”