recommendations posts

Filed under: Productivity, Web services, Google, Social Software, web 2.0

Google Reader now sorts your feeds "by magic"

by Jay Hathaway Oct 25th 2009

Google has made a couple of big improvements to Google Reader, aimed at helping you easily sift through all those RSS feeds to get to the stories you'll find most relevant. One set of new features focuses on finding relevant content that you weren't already aware of, and another feature sorts the stuff you're already subscribed to.

In the sidebar, you'll notice a new "recommended sources" list. These are sites Google Reader thinks you'll like, based on your browsing habits -- if you've opted-in to let Google track those -- and your reading habits in Reader itself. You'll also see a Popular Items section from around the web, showing you some well-read and potentially relevant posts from sites you're not subscribed to.

In addition to these ways of finding new feeds to read, Google Reader can now sort your existing items "by magic," bringing the most relevant articles to the top of your list. To make this happen, go to the settings dropdown for one of your feeds or folders and choose "sort by magic." The magic is actually an algorithm that takes into account what you read and share in Reader, and it seems to work pretty well. I'm not a frequent Google Reader user, and even my relatively untrained recommendations were interesting. If you share and like items on a regular basis, yours will likely be even better.

[via Mashable]

Tags: feeds, google reader, GoogleReader, magic, recommendations, rss

Filed under: Web services, Search

SimilarSites is not just for Firefox anymore

by Jay Hathaway Jun 5th 2009

A few months ago, Brad wrote about a Firefox plugin called SimilarWeb that shows a sidebar full of sites related to the one you're currently looking at. SimilarWeb is still around, but now anybody can use a non-plugin version called SimilarSites. Instead of installing anything, you just type in the URL of a site you're interested in and get recommendations. The add-on might look cooler, but the web version works in any browser.

The recommendations on SimilarSites are quite accurate. When I put in Download Squad, it recommended our esteemed sometimes-rivals over at Lifehacker, as well as one of our sister sites, Engadget. Digging deeper, you'll find slightly more obscure software blogs that look pretty interesting. This is the real strength of SimilarSites.

Everybody's heard of Lifehacker, but now I have some new-to-me sites to add to my RSS reader. Give it a whirl with your favorite site and see what you find.

Tags: recommendations, similar-sites, similarsites, similarweb

Filed under: Web services, Social Software, Web

AlternativeTo offers social software recommendations

by Lee Mathews Apr 14th 2009

We've looked at some ways to find software alternatives in the past - like Openwith.Org and Wakoopa. Social site Alternative.To offers yet another way to see what apps other users recommend.

Categories for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Web-based applications are listed. On each platform page, there are tabbed listings for recent additions, most viewed, and most liked software (I'll skip "OMG FAIL", since you're likely not looking for a "worse alternative" anyway). You'll find all the usual suspects listed, like Photoshop, Nero, Word, as well as user-recommended replacements.

Found a specific user whose suggestions you find particularly useful? Click onto their profile page to view all their likes on one page. Alternative.To also taps into Twitter's massive userbase to give you quick access to additional off-site comments about a particular app.

To cast votes or suggest software, you'll need to log in. Fortunately, Alternative.To supports both Facebook and OpenID sign-ins so you likely won't have to sign up for yet another account. The community is still fairly new, so some entries don't have a lot of votes or recommendations yet, but that will change, obviously, as more users participate.

Tags: recommendations, software-alternatives

Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

Twitter's "Follow Friday" gets its own website

by Jay Hathaway Apr 10th 2009

"Follow Friday" has become one of the most popular social conventions on Twitter. Users post the usernames of some people they want to recommend for their friends to follow, along with the #followfriday hashtag. It's a good way to find some new people to follow who might be relevant to your interests or part of your wider social circle. Now, some Twitter users have collected data from #followfriday tweets on a website called FollowFridays.com, that shows rankings of the most endorsed users each week, and lets you log in to send your own #followfriday picks.

FollowFridays.com bills itself as the official #followfriday site. I don't know the backstory behind its "official" status, but I can tell you that it's a pretty neat idea. It's easy to miss Follow Friday tweets, especially when you follow a lot of people, and this site lets you see who's gotten the most endorsements, and who the biggest #followfriday namedroppers are. Follow Friday isn't something I really get into myself, and I miss the days when it was less formal -- I think the tradeoff for a site that quantifies this stuff is that it can turn into a competition -- but it's often a better way to find people on Twitter than just looking at toplists and rankings that are crowded with popular users you either already know or don't really care about.

If you want to follow the Download Squad team on Twitter, you can find us at @downloadsquad.

Tags: follow, followfriday, recommendations, social, tweet-this, twitter

Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

SuggestRSS knows which blogs you should be reading

by Jay Hathaway Jan 23rd 2009

There's so much good content on the web that even RSS power-users can feel like they're missing something. If you're looking for something fresh to read, you might want to give SuggestRSS a try. It analyzes your feeds and makes recommendations based on data from the hundreds of other people in its database, along with an estimate of the chance that you'll like each suggestion.

SuggestRSS uses a tool that you may or may not be familiar with, the OPML file. Serious RSS fiends know that OPML is a list of RSS feeds you subscribe to. You can export an OPML file from most RSS readers, and that's what SuggestRSS looks at to make recommendations. That way it's not tied to any particular reader. As for the results, they're reasonably useful. In my test, I got a good mix of blogs I already knew about and some I'd never heard of.

Tags: feeds, OPML, recommendations, RSS, SuggestRSS

Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, Social Software

Get a little help from your friends with GigPark

by Emily Price Jun 17th 2008

A few years ago a ton of sites started popping up for you to review local businesses and services in your area. The idea behind the sites such as JudysBook was that reviews were written by average everyday people like you, therefore they could be trusted more than a review you read on another site. Sites allowed you to create a profile, upload a picture, and invite all your friends to join as well so you can share information.

GigPark works under the same principle, except the company assumes to some extent that the people you're friends with on the site are your actual friends, not just people who happened to find you on the site. You can import addresses from your yahoo, hotmail, or gmail account onto the site to find people you know who are already using the service, and invite those who are not.

GigPark also has a Facebook application, so you could pose questions like "Who know a great eye doctor" on facebook and solicit responses from your friends directly on Facebook. Of course your friends would also have to add the application in order for all this magic to happen, which given the multitude of annoying facebook applications kicking around these days, is probably unlikely. You can make your recommendations public however, so even without adding the application your friends can read how excited you are about your new plumber.

What do you think about sites like this? Would you use it to solicit recommendations, or would you rather just call a friend and ask?

Tags: facebook, gig park, GigPark, recommendations

Filed under: Internet, News, Search

Persai recommendation engine launches private beta

by Brad Linder Jan 30th 2008

The folks behind snarky tech news/satire blog Uncov have decided to stop mocking startups and launch their own. Persai is a cross between a search engine and well, we're not really sure what else. Social bookmarking/discovery services like StumbleUpon, we suppose. But without the social aspect.

Here's how it works. You enter a couple of keywords for things you're interested in and Persai will search the web for articles and pages that might match your preferences. The more you use the page, the smarter it gets. If you click on a link, it figures that you'd like to see more pages like this one. If you ignore a link or click the reject button, Persai makes note of that as well.

The idea is that you can visit Persai on a regular basis to find articles you're interested in without entering any search terms after you've created your interests. But since the site seems to be laid out more like a search engine than a news page, we're not sure users will really treat it that way. Fortunately, you can also subscribe to RSS feeds for your interests, which seems like an incredibly useful feature. In theory, you'll be able to find articles from thousands of sites in your RSS reader without subscribing to thousands of RSS feeds. Of course, Persai's learning function will only work if you visit the main page, so you may have to use it for a little while before your RSS feed is really accurate.

Persai is currently in private beta, but you can request an invitation by signing up at the company's home page.

[via VentureBeat]

Tags: news, persai, recommendations

Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Recommendations get friendlier with TrustedOpinion

by Chris Gilmer Jul 30th 2007

Recommendations from friends goes a long way. If a friend suggests a restaurant, chances are you are going to go there. Recommendations have moved onto the web in social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, and now with TrustedOpinion.

TrustedOpinion uses close social sources as a way to rank the trustworthiness of item in question. It is yet another social network that you have to sign up for. So adding your friends to another account is inevitable if you wish to use this service. Nothing is better than getting recommendations from friends and contacts, it's just the signing up for another network and adding people thing we are having a hard time with.

You can also check out Epinions or Amazon for the down low on the products you are hunting for.

Tags: recommendations, social network, SocialNetwork, web2, web2.0

Filed under: Business, Fun, Internet, Web services

Get community recommendations at TrustedPlaces

by Chris Gilmer Jul 5th 2007

Sometimes when in a new city, or even in your own city, you get stuck on where to go. It might be a gamble to try a new place without getting recommendations from people who have been there. Maybe these new places don't have a website, or none of your gang has even heard about them.

TrustedPlaces helps gather opinions from a community of real people. Each recommending places they have experienced in their daily lives. This way discovering new and interesting places doesn't have to be as risky as it once was. The website lets users recommend and review and share places you've been with friends. There is already quite an array of locations including art galleries, lounges, restaurants, car parks, clubs, hotels, and sports items.

TrustedPlaces is currently focused around the UK, with concentration on London.

Tags: london, recommendations, social, trustedplaces, uk, website

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google

Google launches StumbleUpon like toolbar button

by Brad Linder Apr 19th 2007

Well, now that it looks like StumbleUpon is worth something (possibly $40-45 million somethings), it should come as no surprise that Google wants in on the action.

That said, it's probably sheer coincidence that Google launched a recommendations button for Google Toolbar on the same day that news breaks that eBay is positioned to purchase StumbleUpon.

While both Google and StumbleUpon provide you with toolbar buttons that will take you to a wide variety of websites, they differ in how those sites are selected. StumbleUpon is a social network, so you visit sites rated highly by users with similar interests to your own. As you rate more and more sites, the odds increase that you'll only be sent to sites you like.

Google's new toolbar button (shaped like a pair of dice) takes you to a recommended page based on your search history. Google only promises up to 50 new sites per day, whereas you can stumble pretty much forever with StumbleUpon. To be honest, we weren't that impressed with the Google button's initial recommendations. Most of the selections were fairly obvious like Mozilla's Thunderbird homepage.

Google's also added a new recommendations feature for Google Personalized Homepage users. Click the "Add A Tab" button, type in "Recommendations" for the tab name, keeping the "I'm feeling lucky" box checked, and you'll get a page filled with recommendations updated every day.

Don't expect very much at the beginning, but the more you build up your search history, and the more you use these features, the better they'll become. Over time, we will give you more and better recommendations.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Tags: recommendations, search history, SearchHistory, stumbleupon

Filed under: Audio, Web services

Music recommendation round-up

by Jordan Running May 26th 2006

Awhile back we linked to a head-to-head comparison of music recommendation sites Pandora and Last.fm (to refresh your memory, Last.fm came out on top) . Of course, Pandora and Last.fm aren't the only fish in the sea, and ExtremeTech is running a round-up review of eight similar services: MusicStrands, Liveplasma, UpTo11.net, Audiri, Pandora, Mercora, Yahoo! LAUNCHcast Radio, and Last.fm. They ranked the services not only on the quality of their recommendations, but also on usability, diversity of their libraries, and community features. I'll admit that I haven't even heard of a couple of those services (though UpTo11.net gets points for the cheeky name), but ExtremeTech is nothing but thorough. In the end most of the services get high marks (excepting LAUNCHcast, that comes out with a score of 5/10 for ads and low sound quality), but in the end Last.fm beats out the others with a score of 9 and high praise: "by far the best out there, possessing a huge library of music, a great community, and a recommendation feature that will blow you away." Pandora comes in second, also with a score of 9, but falls short due to the lack of community and the songs-per-hour limit.

[Via Waxy.org]

Tags: audiri, extremetech, last.fm, lastfm, launcast, liveplasma, mercora, music, musicstrands, pandora, recommendations, review, roundup, social, upto11, yahoo

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