The Good Stuff Machine: My6Sense Comes to Android. Using algorithms to give personalized recommendations is hard. A lot of online services try to leverage their users' social graphs to determine the stories, books, songs or movies that are potentially of interest to them. Given that your own interests can be quite different from those of your friends, though, these systems are often limited. my6sense, on the other hand builds a personalized and constantly evolving profile for all of its users and provides recommendations purely based on what its algorithm thinks is most likely to be interesting to you.
Starting today, Android users will be able to find the most interesting items in their RSS, Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz feeds with the help of My6Sense. My6Sense: The Basics At its core, My6Sense is a recommendation engine that focuses on highlighting the best stories in your feed subscriptions. We have been tracking the development of my6sense for almost two years now. New on Android: Support for Google Buzz. Online Tracking Company RapLeaf Profiles Users by Name. Facebook: The Entire Web Will Be Social: Tech News and Analysis « Facebook, as expected, launched at its f8 conference in San Francisco today its master plan to make the rest of the web social.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the social networking company’s director of product, Bret Taylor, laid out three major initiatives to that effect. The f8 launches expand on the concept of authenticating on sites using Facebook Connect — which reached 100 million users in its first 15 months — and sending back updates to the Facebook news feed. Most interestingly, Facebook will move from the idea of a transitory stream of actions to give outside sites persistent access to its users.
First, social plugins are little widgets that bring Facebook to the rest of the web. They offer “instant personalization,” said Taylor, with the goal of increasing user engagement, using an iFrame and a cookie remembering the Facebook user. One action in particular will be closely tied back to Facebook: the like button. “The open graph puts people at the center of the web,” he said.
Zebek Jumps Into the Personalization Race: Tech News and Analysis « Now that social is becoming the new norm, the next big battle for companies will be personalization. The company that can get inside my head and deliver tailored recommendations or know what I want without being too stalkerish can walk away with a lot of money.
We’ve seen how powerful that has been for companies like Apple, Pandora, Amazon and Netflix, with their recommendations for content. Now, the race is on to see which company can be a go-to B2B provider for personalization and recommendation services. Hunch has gotten a some press as it’s moved to license its personalization taste graph technology. Yesterday, Gravity debuted at the Web 2.0 Summit, offering to help websites leverage their users’ interest graph. And my6Sense launched earlier this year with apps that take a user’s news feeds and personalize their stream.
Now add Zebek to the list of competitors. The company has signed up Clear Channel Malls as one of its first 25 customers. Can Hunch’s Algorithm Improve Your Gift-Giving Skills?: Tech News and Analysis « With the holidays approaching, we’re entering that time of year when desperate people grab things like ties, inappropriate books and goofy toys in a pathetic attempt to bring joy to their friends and loved ones. Can algorithms help? New York-based startup Hunch thinks they can, and Gifts.com, the shopping site that is part of the IAC empire apparently agrees.
Gifts.com has been using Hunch’s recommendation engine for almost two weeks now, and the company says its conversion rate (i.e., the number of people who go from being shoppers to buyers) is as much as 60 percent higher than it was before the site started using the tool to make recommendations. When you go to the Gifts.com section that’s using Hunch, you’re prompted to log in with your Facebook account, since Hunch uses your Facebook “social graph” or friend connections, to power the feature. When you log in, you see a list of your friends (including those who have birthdays coming up). Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d): Gravity to Release Personalized Newspaper App Orbit | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD. Today Gravity is unveiling its plans to be an information filtering service. The idea is to combine social and semantic understanding of users to identify content they are likely to be interested in. The Santa Monica, Calif. -based company is demoing this idea as a personalized newspaper app called The Orbit (to be released soon).
The Orbit takes a user’s Twitter account and computes the topics a person is interested in and the network she is connected to. For any one Web page, Gravity might look at how recent it is, how popular it is, how relevant it is to a person’s interest and how many of that person’s friends have shared it. Eventually, said Gravity CEO Amit Kapur, the company wants to offer personalization services to publisher sites. So when I go to the New York Times with Gravity enabled, for example, I would be able to get a view of the site’s content that’s weighted to what I am likely to be interested in. The Third Wave of the Web Will Be Uniquely Personal. Two weeks ago, I wrote about the increasing attention crisis facing many of us as we work to find relevant and beneficial content from the many different sources that are challenging us for our time and energy.
The gist? More content is being created in more places and "can't miss" content is increasing at the same rate, making many of us feel we are constantly in a state of missing things, forced to chew through the noise to find the best updates, but still falling short. I believe we are on the cusp of a massive change and opportunity on the Web today - one that will no doubt be debated, but one that I am seeing morph in front of us, as the Web evolves, and initial problems are considered solved, while new ones crop up. The First Wave: Information and Access While it may initially have seemed the "winners" of this game would be those providing access to the Web, including ISPs like AOL and Earthlink, browser providers like Netscape, portals, such as Yahoo!
The Second Wave: Social. My6sense Brings Personalization to the Twitter Stream: Tech News and Analysis « Taming Twitter’s stream of endless data can be daunting, especially as you follow more people. But startup My6sense is bringing some order to the chaos with a new Chrome browser extension that prioritizes a user’s Twitter stream, making it relevant to a user’s tastes and interests. The new feature, available Wednesday, builds off My6sense’s mobile applications, which take in a variety of social and RSS streams and personalizes it for mobile users.
The new Twitter feature takes some of the same learnings but applies it just to Twitter. After enabling My6sense, a prioritized view of the stream appears in a new tab to the right on Twitter.com. Instead of a chronological listing of tweets, updates that are deemed relevant to a user rise to the top, regardless of their timeliness. My6sense doesn’t require a user to set their preferences. This seems like a natural way to handle the flood of information we’re increasingly encountering. Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):