Introducing the Recommendation Engine

One of the problems with the internet has been that there is so much information out there, and so much being added every second, that its not possible to keep up. So how to you see through all this clutter to the information that matters to you?

Well, the answer is that you use social bookmarking sites like ma.gnolia or del.icio.us or content sharing and discovery site like stumbleupon, digg or mixx. These work by allowing you to see what information other people are looking at, or finding interesting. In effect its like a giant popularity contest the more people recommending a link the more likely it is to be displayed on the main page. Recently Yahoo introduced 'buzz' combining their search analytics with user recommendation.

In recent years there have been all sorts of interesting improvements to social discovery, in terms of the ways that information is displayed digglabs coming up with the stack, swarm, bigspy and arc and most recently pics options. While these are all really fun, they are still more entertaining than labour saving. Sure splitting the information into groups is useful, but its still not accurate enough to make it really useful.

I spend most of my day connected to the internet in one way or another, so its no surprise I have tried most of the social bookmarking and content sharing sites, and one of the things that i have always wished for, was the ability to submit a url to a site and have the site come back with recommendations on related information that i might find useful.


It would seem that this request was at last been answered, Digg.com just launched a Beta of a service they are calling the recommentaion engine. The recommendation engine works in a quite complex way cross referencing what it knows about you, with what it knows about people with similar tastes to you, and what it knows about the url you submitted to come up with links to relevant information.

Flickr Update Home Page

Ahead of the role out of its new look home page to all users, flickr are offering users to option to opt into the new look design. The new layout is not to dis-similar to the original design, in fact i had to look several times before i could see where the changes were. Some elements have been move around a little, there is a great new stats option (bit more about that in a moment), there is an option to toggle between recent updates and recent activity and there are a couple of sections that display a random sections, so sometimes you'll see group images and othertimes interesting images from the last 7 days etc.

The biggest change that i found was the addition of the stats section, this shows a small graph of the hits to your site on the home page, when you click on the link you'll get an array of stats ranging from a graph of hits per day, to summary of how many images, sets and collections you have, where links came from, which are most popular and how many images have been favourited or are yet to be viewed. All of which I actually found very revealing.

In my opinion while the changes have been nicely done. Because on the surface they appear to be slight, you retain familiarity with the page, but what they have changed has add a great deal to to the functionality of the page, putting even more information at your fingertips.

Facebook and Live Search

Facebook this week teamed up with Microsoft Live Search, to provide an internet search facility within the facebook platform. The search facility has been in the header since the introduction of the new look layout a couple of months ago, but previously only returned results from the facebook site, friend, group or application information that kind of thing.


Most browsers now have search bars these days, and many sites have a search the internet box somewhere, so why its not exactly heartstopping news. In fact Facebook didn't even make a big this of its introduction, so why have i bothered to blog about it? Well... there were 2 things that interested me, firstly its interesting that facebook chose to go with microsoft, not google when it came to search technology, and secondly was that fact that they chose to provide the results in there standard facebook formating. The implication being that facebook is becoming so large and portal like, that some of its users are more comfortable with their formating than they are with the standard google or msn search pages. In some ways reminiscent of the way AOL presented the internet in the 90's.

I have to admit that i wasn't a fan of the new facebook layout when it came out and I'm not convinced that this is a feature that i'm going to use. But I am beginning to see where they are going with the new layout and little by little, its becoming more usable.

Picasa Introduce Facial Recognition

In contrast to hype surrounding of the launch of Crome, Google’s new web browser, Picasa web album another of the Google family, very quietly launched an interesting technology of their own, this week.


The new Picasa technology, referred to as ‘name tagging’, takes some of the pain out of adding tags relating to the identity of individuals in your photographs. If you share photos on the internet, you’ll be used to adding tags (or keywords) to your images. Tags help you find your images within sets or collections on your site and allow search engines to catalogue them effectively.


One of the best things about the new name tagging technology is that it sits very comfortably with the old site, a new button has appeared giving you the option to add name tags. There is no need to reload images that you have already uploaded.

The name tagging process, automatically identifies what it thinks are faces within your images, it then asks you to put names those faces. Once you have named a person a couple of times, it will learn to identify that person for you and automatically tag them for you in future uploads.

To make tagging easier, Picasa automatically links to your gmail contacts and predicatively tries to fill names for you as you type. Another technology enhancement also allows “geo tagging” or adding geographical data to shots, by allowing you to drag and drop images to Google maps.
The application works best with higher resolution images and images that are taken from a similar angle to shots its already seen, and in some cases will ask you to confirm the identity of a person that it does not recognise.

Of course, you have the option to keep images private or to share them, but being a Google related technology, if you choose to share your images they will very quickly be picked up in Google searches, and if you are using the Google labs advanced search tools, the location will be picked up by the geographical filtering.

Picasa has been around for a while, but its always been overshadowed by yahoo’s flickr. Will this sort of advancement in technology be enough to tip the balance in Picasa favour.

Google Crome Goes Beta

Google Launched Chrome, their new browser in a slightly unusual way this morning (02 Sept 08), sending a cartoon strip (drawn by Scott McCloud) to google based blog site blogoscoped. They later said that this was an error and that the comic should not have been sent out prior to the launch. The 38 page comic explained how browsing the internet was changing, the technology behind their new browser, why they had built it from scratch and what it meant to the user. This was not only a very creative approach to explaining very complex technology, but a very effective one.

The Beta which is available for download now, is limited to the pc platform at this time (mac and linux versions promised to follow shortly).The Beta launched in 100 counties simultaneously, and is available to all users, rather than being invite only or users having to sign up to a waiting list.

Google's website states 'Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier' .

Sundar Pinchai, VP Product Management, and Linus Upson, Engineering Director say on their blog "all of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends - all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build."

Many google watchers have been speculating that google would introducing a browser for some time, building on their knowledge of the search engine industry and web aps. Initial response to the release has been good, with many key bloggers and technologists giving it great reviews already. My experience has been that the beta seems to be not only stable, but very fast.

Some of the key features are; the One box for everything, essentially the search bar and address bar have been combined so you can enter a url or a search term into the same box. They have managed to make this simple and intuitive, in a very elegant way, using colour and shade, so that while the whole url is displayed the root part of the url stands out, so you know exactly where you are.

Crash control, these days tabbed browsing is pretty much the norm, but the more tabs you have open the more chance that one tab will freeze, and usually when that happens the whole browser freezes, but chrome operates each process in its own memory, and offers a task manager like control over these processes.

Incognito Mode, sometimes you may not want to have your browsing saved in the browser history, or to have store cookies stored (for example if you have a family computer and want to purchase a surprise gift for your wife online without her knowing) but you may not want to delete your whole history or all your cookies. Incognito mode allows you to easily switch between privacy levels.

Open source, the code for chrome is available to developers, so they can write their own plug-ins and add-on, increasing the functionality of the platform.

So i guess the big question is will i be switching to chrome? While i would love to answer that with a simple yes, i'm going to have to answer with "its complicated!". For a start i do some of my work on a mac, so i can switch quite yet, also by favourite plug in's are not yet available for chrome, and it doesn't have the functionality of flock for social networking, or run some of the new microsoft products like live mesh or photosynth. So while i'll certainly be doing some of my browsing (especially when doing research online) i won't be using it for everything just yet!