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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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More than 250 people attended a Hadoop developer event at Yahoo! this week, demonstrating again the level of interest the company has in open-source big data initiatives. Yahoo! says it is the world's biggest Hadoop supporter. We say that's undoubtedly correct. Yahoo! supports community developer events throughout the world. In February it supported the first Hadoop! event in India. In June, it will host the Hadoop Summit. Sponsor Yahoo! is not always recognized for its cloud computing efforts but its deep commitment to Hadoop shows how the company views the ways that big data can be used to solve major technology issues such as spam. Hadoop, according to Wikipedia , "is a Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data." The developer conference featured discussions from the Hadoop community, including a presentation about using it to fight spam lead and a discussion led by a lead engineer from Facebook. Vishwanath Ramarao is director of anti-spam engineering for Yahoo! Mail. According to the Yahoo! developer blog, Vish described the intricate cat-and-mouse games played with spammers, and how Yahoo! uses Hadoop to abstract away the complexity of large scale data analysis and provide deep insight into spammer campaigns. Yahoo! Mail antispam - Bay area Hadoop user group Johhn Sichi, lead engineer for Facebook's data infrastructure team provided an overview of Facebook's work using Hadoop to manage data that is growing 8x annually, In March, 2008 traffic volume hit 200 GB per day. By the end of last year, traffic bumped to 12 terabytes per day. Hadoop, Hbase and Hive- Bay area Hadoop User Group Companies like Yahoo! and Facebook use Hadoop to organize data and process it from multiple sources. For instance, Facebook might use it to organize how it deploys its ad network. Yahoo! may be on to the most powerful use for cloud computing or at least the most interesting. And it shows how the company is thinking about cloud computing and the ways it applies to its overall strategy. Discuss
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Yahoo!'s Smart Investment: The Hadoop Community
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Today on the Facebook blog , Alex Li announced that Facebook would institute a number of new, or newish, features that will multiply the connectivity of the community. These features are Community Pages and Connected Profiles. "Community Pages are a new type of Facebook Page dedicated to a topic or experience that is owned collectively by the community connected to it." Unlike a Facebook page devoted to, or run by, a company, a Community Page might be devoted to an area or an activity that cannot be legitimately claimed by a limited group such as a corporation. Sponsor These pages are not community-created, not off the block anyway. Users can make their own . But Facebook has created Heaven only knows how many Pages out of raw Wikipedia copy. Will Facebook users interested in Sichuan cooking or the subtle charms of Orlando, Florida, race forward to create independent copy and make the placeholders into something more than linkbait? Li-i-i-nks! Li-i-i-nks! The Connected Profiles certainly add to this proliferation of linking. Fields in your profile, like city, education and employer, as well as your interests, will now be automatically linked to their respective pages. "Instead of just boring text," said Li, "these connections are actually Pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you." Additionally, each time you login, Facebook will have a suggestion box filled to bursting with links for you. Frankly, the proliferation of links that result from these features makes it sound like nothing so much as a content farm like Answers.com or Demand Media. If you're publicity shy, you may need to avoid these Community Pages altogether. "Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you're connected to." The solution? Never connect to any page that indicates an interest you don't want the world to know about. If you find yourself connected already, disconnect as quickly as you can. Given the automatism of the profile links, it looks like you will be publicly linked and will have to de-link from each page you don't want, regardless of how clear you've been about your privacy. Discuss
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Facebook's Community Pages Unleashed Upon World
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As a recent article in The Economist observed, we are at the point of an "industrial revolution of data," with vast amounts of digital information being created, stored and analyzed. The rise of "big data" has led in turn to an increased demand for tools to both analyze and visualize the information. This bodes well for startups tackling the field. One new service is Flowing Media , the new company of Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, a consultancy focused on data visualization services. Sponsor Prior to founding Flowing Media, Viégas and Wattenberg worked for IBM's Visual Communications Lab . Their Many Eyes project was one of the first to put visualization tools in the hands of the public, with the goal of democratizing visualization and the accompanying social analysis. According to Viégas and Wattenberg, visualization is a powerful analytical tool for experts and non-experts. "It's an excellent way to attract non-geeks to complex data and can spark conversation." They note that a good visualization can easily go viral on the Web, touching millions of people. As "big data" becomes more accessible, visualization services like Flowing Media are sure to flourish. After all, as Viégas and Wattenberg note, "Today many facets of life are made of nothing but data, from flirting on Facebook to photos on Flickr." Image credits: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, top: Wired Magazine - "A visualization of thousands of Wikipedia edits that were made by a single software bot. Each color corresponds to a different page." and bottom: Flickr Flow , the colors in photos uploaded to Flickr. Discuss
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Visualize Big Data with Flowing Media
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Ever since Steve Jobs first announced iBooks for the iPad, pundits have been wondering about the future of the Kindle and similar e-book readers in the face of this new competition. Now that we actually have access to an iPad , we had a chance to take a closer look at both the iBooks and Amazon's Kindle for iPad apps. We are still waiting for the B&N iPad app, but both iBooks and iPad for Kindle already highlight the iPad's potential as an e-book reader. Sponsor iBooks It doesn't come as a surprise that Apple managed to develop the prettier e-reader app. Switching from the iBooks store - which looks a lot like the App Store - to your bookshelf is done through a nifty animation. Newly downloaded books and samples smoothly slide into the bookshelf and thanks to a faux 3d look and a page-flip animation, the app itself mimics the look and feel of a book. When you click on a book in your shelf, it flips open and zoom to the page you left off. Flipping the iPad to landscape mode switches iBooks from displaying on page per screen to a more book-like two-page view. Given how wide the iPad's screen its, this makes it a lot easier to read as the individual lines are much shorter. With regards to customization, iBooks allows its users to change the size of the font, but also the font itself (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times New Roman and Verdana). You can also set the screen brightness right from within any book, which is great for reading at night. As far as we can see, however, you can't switch to white text on a black background. Another neat feature is the search function that feels a lot like Spotlight on OSX. This search feature is extremely fast - though sadly it only works for the book that you are currently reading. You can't search through all of your library, though you can initiate a Google and Wikipedia search from within any book (these open up Safari, however). The iBooks app can also read DRM-free ePub texts. You simply download the e-book to your computer, drag it into iTunes and after your next sync, it will appear in iBooks. iBooks Store The iBooks store mostly features books between $9.99 and $14.99 (with a few outliers). There are currently about 30,000 free books in the store (courtesy of Project Gutenberg) and about 60,000 books from most major publishers - though there are still some holdouts . Every book in the store allows you to download a free sample (sometimes more than 50 pages long). Kindle for iPad Amazon, of course, offers a far larger store than Apple. With close to 450,000 paid and free books. It's worth noting that the Kindle store also launched with slightly more books (about 88,000). Compared to iBooks, Kindle for iPad feels a bit more pedestrian, as it doesn't feature fancy animations. Pages just slide left and right and instead of two-page view when you flip the iPad to landscape mode, you just get a single page with a very wide layout. The Kindle app also doesn't allow users to customize the font of a book, though it does offer the standard screen brightness and font size settings. Unlike the iBooks app, which only has a bookmark feature, the Kindle app allows users to annotate books and highlight passages in these texts. For students, this is a must-have feature and it's surprising that Apple didn't include this in its app. As with its other mobile apps, Amazon forces its readers to download apps from the Kindle online store. The only way to access this is through the browser. Here, Apple's ability to integrate the store into the e-reader application is a big plus. Verdict: iBooks is the Better App; Kindle is the Better Platform In terms of functionality, the choice between the two apps depends on your needs. If you need to highlight and if you want to take notes, then the Kindle app is the only way to go. If you just want to read, the iBooks apps is just fine. Prices in both the iBooks and Kindle store are likely to be very similar - especially now that Amazon is slowly giving up on its idea of selling all e-books at $9.99. The real advantage of the Kindle app is that you can read and sync books with more devices. You can start reading a book on the iPad at home or on the plane, for example, and then continue reading on your iPhone while you are waiting in line at the post office. Chances are that Apple will launch an iBooks app for the iPhone sooner or later, but until then, investing in Kindle books seems like a smarter decision as you don't lock yourself completely into Apple's smaller ecosystem. More About the iPad Launch Click here for our full archive of posts about the iPad launch . Discuss
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E-Books on the iPad: iBooks vs. Kindle for iPad
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