blogstring.com

If you’re a frequent reader here at good ole blogstring.com, you’ll know that I’m very, very interested in recommendation technology. So I was excited to check out kiobo, a browser plugin, that launched their public beta yesterday. Their idea is to offer recommendations based on a user’s browsing history and the browsing history of their friends. There are many similar social recommendation technologies out there (loomia, mystrands, blippr, wisia), so kiobo is entering a very crowded market.

Let’s Take A Look

Kiobo only works for Firefox right now, but promises versions for IE and Safari. To get going, you’ll just need to sign up, install the toolbar, and restart firefox.

The first time I tried it didn’t work. I installed, restarted firefox, and nothing showed up. The second time, it showed up.

Once you go to the kiobo site, you’ll notice that it’s an entirely flash-based interface:

The recommendations start by looking at your clickstream. Kiobo actually will look at every site you visit and record a history of clicks, then show you screenshots of your browser history.

For the social aspect, kiobo also gives recommendations based on what your friends are checking out. Unfortunately for me, since I just signed up I have no friends:

Why, thank you, Kiobo for that profound sense of loneliness.

So when I decide to add friends I’m completely stumped. I can’t find a way to add a friend. When I go to settings> manage friends, I get this:

Okay, fine. Maybe kiobo is just trying to let me know that I’m not a likeable guy and that it’s impossible for me to sustain actual human friendships.

Time to check out sites  based on what’s growing in popularity:

Whoa. It’s taking minutes to load. Minutes. But finally I got:

2girls1finger.info? I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’m going to visit that one. And hey, I’m being unfairly harsh here, as the suggestions based on what’s growing are sites that have less than five visits. As always I have to say: this thing just started.

The Verdict

Well, it’s impossible to really review a service that gives recommendations based on click history and friends without any click history and no way to add friends. So I have to give my completely unsatisfactory answer- I’ll just have to wait and see.

But when it comes to the first group of recommendations, I have to say that they were pretty good. I definitely like the tech sites they presented me, and I’m hoping that with some more history, I’ll be shown some sites I’m not aware of that I’ll actually like.

Filed under: Uncategorized, blog discovery, media discovery, recommendation, social media, startups