Get Recommendations from Taste Kid

Martin — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:23:50 +0000

Back in the days when the Internet was just a series of tubes music, movie and book fans had to get their recommendations from magazines, friends and the guy in the store that sold them the stuff. Recommendations on today’s Internet are a big thing. They are highly popular with users and companies alike. Users are happy that they find new bands, actors, movies and books while companies sell more if they offer recommendations.

Taste Kid (via Genbeta) concentrates on books, movies and music which is something that I have not seen that often yet. Normally it’s only one of the three and not all of them. The website consists of a form where the user can enter something that he likes that relates to books, music or movies. This can be an artist or a name of a product.

Taste Kid will then pull data from the database and display recommendations based on the user’s input. If you enter 24 (the TV series) for example you get recommendations for Lost and The Office among others.

One interesting aspect of the website is that you do get recommendations for books and music as well if you entered for example a movie title. This does not happen all of the time though.

A brief description (taken from Wikipedia mostly it seems) is available for many items that are mentioned on the website and the site even embeds Youtube videos when available which is great to get a first impression of that recommendation.

Another interesting aspect of Taste Kid is that the website is not commercial (yet). You do not find links to online stores where you can buy the media directly. As of now it’s just a way to receive recommendations that include previews.

Tags: book, book recommendations, movie, movie recommendations, music, music recommendations, recommendations, taste kid

Giggle Music and Event Recommendations

Martin — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:45:31 +0000

Giggle released a beta version of their music and event recommendation software that currently works only with Apple’s iTunes software and the event recommendations seem to be exclusively for locations in Great Britain. A registration is required before you can start Giggle for the first time. Giggle is picking up songs that are playing in iTunes automatically and is scanning its database for music recommendations. Up to four recommendations are shown in the main interface.

Each recommendation displays the cover artwork, name of the band and three icons. While the first icon does not seem to do anything the other two are linking directly to the iTunes store page of that band and to a event finder that is displaying the upcoming events for the artist or group. I had best results with well known groups and songs, especially those from Britain.

Most did not return recommendations yet. This will surely change over time when more users download and use the software. The events sometimes take some time to load and are currently only suggesting locations in Britain. Events are also accessible through their own icon at the top which does make sense because no one is going to play one song, switch to Giggle to see if there are any events and then continue playing songs.

The link displays all band names with events and users can switch to the recommendations that only display events of artists that have been played by the user. Events are directly linking to ticket shops on the Internet.

Giggle does offer something new and I really like the idea of event recommendations or reminders. If they manage to add events for a larger audience, say all of Europe and North America they surely could become a very popular service. Another feature that I would like to see is that Giggle will be compatible to additional music players like Winamp and XMPlay.

If you currently live in the UK you can already use Giggle. Everyone else should wait until they manage to add events for your country.

Tags: apple itunes, artists, event recommendations, giggle, itunes, mp3, music, music recommendations

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Get Recommendations from Taste Kid

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