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It's hard to keep up with all the newly released movies and music these days, but a lightweight social network with a whole lot of smarts under the hood says it can now offer you personalized recommendations of new releases that suit your very particular interests. GetGlue is a semantic web browser plug-in that has, for years, been smart enough to recognize when you're looking at the same musical group across different websites, be that on Last.fm, MySpace or elsewhere. The service recently added a stream of recommendations of music, movies, books, magazines, wikipedia articles and other things you might like. How can it tell what you'll like when something is brand new, though? Today the service has launched a "new releases" section, where human editors rush to classify brand-new media. Then the semantic robots can serve it up to the right users, still hot out of the oven. It's pretty cool. Sponsor GetGlue founder Alex Iskold says he's learned a lesson similar to what formerly automated tech news aggregator Techmeme has learned: algorithms and user generated content can take you a long way, but there comes a point when it's good to hire some dedicated editors. The service asks you to like or unlike a wide variety of things. It then uses that feedback to build a taste profile to compare against things it finds put into its database and find the stuff it thinks you'll like. That's harder with new releases, though. "When something new is coming out, we don't know what it's like, so you need to have proffessionals tag it," Iskold told us. "We have two editors on staff who look across the spectrum of new releases each week. They draw the similarities between things in a deep way - the tagging system we use will be unvieled later. We use really eclectic tags to characterize what kind of zombie or vampire movie something is. We also use tags brought in from other systems and our users find cool new things really fast." The end result is a nicely displayed stream of big icons for personally recommended newly released movies, music and books. You think you're hip to your scene now? Wait until you've got a network of contacts, a semantic robot and real human editors all working together to bring you the freshest content in your weird little niche. To be honest, I've been testing it out today by switching from new album recommendations on Glue over to Apple's Lala.com , where it's easy to listen to full albums once for free. That's not the way Glue wants you to use it, but that's the way I like to use it so far. The Down Side It's an incredible system, when it works. GetGlue knows though that there are some challenges in this kind of game though. First, it's not easy to present this kind of flow of data to users without either overwhelming them or boring them. Many of GetGlue's latest changes are focused on making the user experience more pleasant: bigger images, collapsed bundles of shared items, etc. Can the service find a balance between giving you strong-enough recommendations on one hand and regularly offering up new recommendations on the other? In past versions of the product, I've received too few recommendations to keep me coming back. Hopefully new releases will scratch that itch. Iskold also says that after "liking" only 15 musical artists, I'm actually much less active than most of the 400,000 registered users of the service. Personally, I'm more drawn to the Wikipedia recommendations on GetGlue than anything else. The new releases in music might be roughly in the same sub-genres I usually listen to, but that doesn't mean they are any good. Finally, all this "liking" obviously begs the Facebook question. Writing as an ostensible Facebook competitor about that giant network's radical innovations unveiled last week, Iskold wrote the following in a widely-read article here at ReadWriteWeb about Facebook's Open Graph: "Time will tell where we land, but my gut is that positive things will come out of this. If nothing else, let's give Facebook credit for innovation and re-imagination the Web." Today he emphasized in speaking with me that Facebook is new to what it's just begun to do, but his company has been doing it for years. There's no guarantee that Facebook will get it right, he said. It's hard to say for sure that GetGlue has got it right, either. But as a work in progress, it's pretty darned good and today's new additions are very interesting. Discuss
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GetGlue Adds New Releases to Recommendations Made by Human & Machine
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After going off a bit this morning on how content personalization and recommendation engines can be the death of free thought and lively debate, we figured we'd send you off into the weekend with a fun little gadget we found in the process - a social recommendation service for Foursquare called Meet Gatsby . Meet Gatsby works alongside Foursquare, keeping track of your check-ins, making recommendations when people with similar interests check in nearby. Sponsor We're immediately reminded of Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com ) as we are cordially greeted by Gatsby when we arrive at the site. Gatsby, you see, is here to help you, personally, meet like-minded people while your out on the town. "Hi, I'm Gatsby," reads the site. "I'll introduce you to nearby people with interests you share, whenever you check in on Foursquare." Signing up for the service takes five minutes, tops, and you're ready to go. Simply sign up with your Foursquare account, add interest keywords and a phone number, and you're ready to go. Immediately, you'll receive a text saying "Hi, I'm Gatsby. I'll be texting you from this number when I find matches for you nearby." From there, all you need to do is check in with Foursquare and Meet Gatsby will handle the rest. When we discussed Robert Scoble's blog entry this morning on how location based services need to use a malleable social graph to remain competitive, it was precisely this type of service that he alluded to and we agreed on. Games and virtual items will not keep Foursquare, Gowalla or any of the other LBS out there afloat, but adding context and connection will. Meet Gatsby acts as a perfect layer on top of Foursquare to give it something it's missing - a link to like-minded people around you. From what we can see on the Meet Gatsby Twitter account , the service is relatively new and taking input on new features. It looks like we can look forward to some additional settings and functionality in the future, such as different match radii in different cities and Twitter DM notifications. For now, it looks like a really interesting idea that we're going to give a run out on the town this weekend. Meet you out there? Discuss
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Meet Gatsby: Connect With Like-Minded Foursquare Users Around You
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We trust services like Last.fm or Pandora to learn our musical tastes and serve up custom radio stations, so why not the same for the numerous streams that bombard us daily? My6Sense , a recommendation engine for your social streams and news feeds, is releasing its functionality today in its " Attention API " at the DEMO conference. Sponsor The company released an iPhone app last summer, which uses the company's "digital intuition" to determine the particular stories and status updates that are most relevant to you according to what you've clicked on and spent time with in the past. The system learns from you, becoming more familiar with what you are interested in as time goes on. According to the press release, "the service is content/stream agnostic and can automatically rank information from all types of sources -- including social streams like Twitter, news streams, RSS, vertical content providers, open whiteboards and more. The solution is optimized for mobile platforms, where digital clutter is the most prominent, and can be successfully used on non-mobile sites and applications as well." With services like Pandora, you need to let the program know when you like or dislike something. The "Attention API", on the other hand, simply requires that the site making use of it report back user activity in order to learn the user's habits and preferences. While this sounds great, and we can see it filtering out some of the noise, we have the same concerns about it as we do about Google customizing our search - that we will end up in an echo chamber of like-minded thought. As our own Frederic Lardinois pointed out when reviewing the My6Sense iPhone app, you may want to step outside the recommendations once in a while for a breath of fresh air. If you are a real news junkie, you will probably still sometimes want to switch to the regular timeline mode that organizes items chronologically. After all, the items you don't usually think you would be interested in can sometimes really grab your attention (which is, to be honest, a problem that all recommendation systems have to grapple with). On the company's API page , it mentions that the API will provide "No fear of bombardment" as "Developers and publishers can broadcast any amount of information and content to a widespread audience, which reaching individual consumers with messages that are uniquely relevant to them." We would hope that, in reality, any service using the API would notify its users that it was doing so and even offer the ability to step outside of the service's recommendations. Discuss
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My6Sense Releases API: 'Digital Intuition' for the Real-Time Web
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