Advisory News: MyLikes Announces Funding, Advisory Board

Today, MyLikes, formerly Likaholix, announced they have raised more than $600,000 in funding from former Googlers, and the addition of a few names to their advisory board, myself included. As you know, I've been watching Likaholix (and now MyLikes) since their launch in March of 2009, and outside of the blog, I have had numerous conversations, by phone, e-mail and in person, with co-founder Bindu Reddy on the company's progress, morphing from a social recommendation engine, to one focused on word of mouth advertising for the Web. It will be a fun challenge to have a helping hand in the company's move to the next stage.

As I have said many times here, I am not a fan of unfocused advertising or low-quality ads and for the most part, I am not a fan of advertising for advertising's sake. But I am a big fan of relevancy, and leveraging one's social graph to discover what people are not just liking, but recommending, and actually buying. Those are reasons I have been working with my6sense on relevancy, and what attracted me to sites like FriendFeed and Likaholix in the first place - as well as Blippy, where I am a happy oversharer of my actual purchasing history.

MyLikes Lets Me Select Available Advertisers And See Potential Revenue

MyLikes' attraction to me is the platform's ability to have people act as influencers in their community, promoting items and services that make the most sense for them, to their friends, and getting rewarded for spreading the word. It's something I do informally all the time as I praise some products and ignore others, and while I may not be the perfect target for this kind of affiliate model, others are finding the approach to be significantly improved, in terms of click-through rates and payouts, than standard keyword advertising.

Creating an Ad in MyLikes for Google Apps

The Ad, via MyLikes, Posted to Twitter

Ads on influencers' blogs or tweets or other social activity, which are hand-selected by the individual, carry much more weight than those selected by a generic ad network. And as Twitter has made a lot of noise around their own approach to revenue, enabling big companies to promote their services in the tweet stream, MyLikes lets the users benefit from similarly promoting exactly what they like and signing their name to it - extending beyond Twitter, but to blogs and other sites as well.

Given my history of not embracing off-topic advertising, I am looking forward to working with MyLikes to drive quality through the system. You can be sure I will be one of their more interactive advisors, and they will hear from me often.

DISCLOSURES: I am an unpaid advisor to MyLikes. I hold a small equity stake in the company. In addition, my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. My comments on the company's product are always independent, and do not pass their way in advance.

eSocialWeb Wants You to Share Sites and Services With Friends

One of the fastest-growing niches in social networks these days is the ability to review products and services and share comments with friends, helping to discover new things and new people. We saw this trend with the debut of Lunch.com last month, and Likaholix in March. Also launching in that timeframe was a smaller site, focusing only on Web sites and Web applications, called eSocialWeb.

eSocialWeb breaks down Web sites into a set of familiar categories, from Entertainment and Lifestyle to Shoping, News, Technology and Business. Like with Digg, you can submit new entries if they don't already exist in the system, vote up ones that already are on the site, bury them, or add a comment. And like Digg and other services, you can link up with friends and get recommendations based on your own submissions.


Recommendations from within eSocialWeb

Submitting Apple to eScocialWeb's Index
Today, the top sites on the service include Mint.com, the online finance software tool, Hulu, and XKCD, among others. And I found submitting new sites, like Apple, to eSocialWeb very simple, just like with Likaholix. You can also see the most recent activity across the site or by individual.


Recent Activity on eSocialWeb
Does the Web need another social site for friends to trade links? Maybe not. But this is one site that's trying to win a small niche with focus. Check it out at http://www.esocialweb.com. You can find me at louisgray, as always.

Lunch.com Opens Up, Connecting Similar People Through Reviews

Outside of Facebook and MySpace, a growing number of Web fanatics are getting social and sharing their likes and dislikes in a number of new networks - including Likaholix, which launched earlier this year, and the new Lunch.com, which emerged from beta this evening. Based on information you provide the network, Lunch.com connects users with similar interests, hoping you can find good content through peers - focusing primarily on rich reviews and a collection of facts, essentially taking the best of Yelp.com and Wikipedia.

When you open an account on Lunch.com, the site asks you for your spheres of interest (like Technology, TV and Music), and then prompts you to suggest favorites in each category, including TV shows, bands, albums and the like. Based on these entries, you then further refine your profile by rating suggested items on a -5 to +5 scale (higher being better). The more data you select, the more likely it is that you will find other Lunch.com users like you and therefore possibly discover content and helpful reviews.


Entering My Profile Data to Lunch.com

Saying What I Like More or Like Less
The site takes some elements of Delicious or MyBlogLog, letting you browse popular tags, and drill down into the rich content pushed into the service. Click through to Books and you will find popularly rated and reviewed items, as wella s related tags, like Nonfiction, Politics and Biography. Choose Electronics instead and you get the option to review popular items such as the iPhone 3G, MacBook Pro or Bose(R) Headphones.


Top Tags on Lunch.com
As you rack up activity on Lunch.com, you accumulate an ever-higher number of reviews and other users can rate your review as "Helpful", "Thought Provoking", "Fun to read" or "Well Organized". (See this iPhone review for one popular article.)


Lunch.com Updates Activity In Real Time
And like with most sites, you can connect and "follow" other users, which will become relevant as you determine how high your similarity score is. A higher similarity score, like on Toluu and other comparative products, is determined by the level of overlap you have. Interestingly, Lunch.com also not only shows top contributors by total activity, but also a "Recent Activity" feed that in real-time is updated as reviews flow in. One of the fastest-flowing items in the site is a feature called "ExhilaRATE", which lets you further refine your profile by rating items up or down, like the "Top Movies of 2008" or "Favorite Sportscasters.


One of My Reviews on Lunch.com
As usual, you can find my profile at the "louisgray" ID, here: http://www.lunch.com/louisgray. Maybe you'll even like my review of the BabyBjorn Infant Carrier." I said it was a must if you want to be mobile and carry your baby.

Likaholix Rewards Early Active Users With Kindles, Adds Moderators

About a month ago, Likaholix debuted as a site to share interests with friends, similar to aspects of both Facebook and FriendFeed. As part of their strategy to promote activity among early users, the site's developers debuted a promotion that rewarded five beta users with Amazon Kindles, provided they were among the top 30 users in terms of activity, being rated as "most interesting" or "popular". Well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed and Jason Shellen of Plinky assisted in the selections, which were revealed today.

The five winners include:

• Mindy
• Justine Ezarik
• Chris Pirillo
• Chris Bellevie
• Katrina Schmidt

iJustine and Chris you probably know. The other three are more obscure, and rose to the top of Likaholix' lists due to their participation. Chris Bellevie was listed as the most active user, the 3rd highest in finding items first, and 8th most popular, while Katrina was the 4th most active, the 2nd highest in terms of finding new items to "like" on the service, and 9th most popular. Mindy is listed as the 8th most active, 7th fastest to find new items, and 10th most popular on the site. (For comparative ego purposes, I was 17th most popular...)

While the giveaway is fun, Likaholix isn't just bribing its users to stick around. The service is now launching a new Wikipedia-like moderation service that asks active users to take a more active role in the community, being able to add, edit or delete topics on other users' activity, and helping to "police the topic pages", according to Bindu Reddy, the company's founder.

Likaholix is also starting a new promotion pushing friends to get more users to the site - so if you find Likaholix likeable, you can spread the news and maybe even get rewarded. Check this link for more.

You can see my account at: http://likaholix.com/louisgray and can sign up here.

Likaholix Launches Recommendation Engine Based On Social "Liking"

New services for people to connect to peers and share their interests are cropping up around every Web corner. Some, like Facebook and FriendFeed, have found strong, growing communities, where people find things they care about, and discuss those items. And as FriendFeed has discovered, the simple act of "liking" an item and enabling comments, helped the site differentiate itself from practically every other aggregator out there. This morning, Likaholix, sprung from the minds of some former Googlers, follows suit with a site dedicated to just your likes - whatever they may be, but adds on suggested items, recommendations, and even experts.

(Skip this post and get one of 200 invites: here)
No matter how many new lines of business Google finds itself in these days, its core value has always been search and retrieval of information. That mantra has been seen in sites developed by its former employees, like FriendFeed, with its integrated search, and now, also with Likaholix, who takes things a step further, by not just crawling a database, but auto-competing search terms, as does Google Suggest. And these auto-suggestions come packed with a ton of books, restaurants, and even movies and music - in what may be a vain hope that you won't see the same few dozen self-proclaimed social media experts lauding the latest technology update over and over.


Likaholix's Search Engine Auto-Suggest Feature In Action


Likaholix's Search Engine Results

Likaholix even suggests items that nobody likes, guessing that somebody will, and eventually, they would be selected.


Surely Somebody Finds South Park Funny?

As Likaholix is all about what you like, you're credited for being the first to like any item. On your profile, not only does it show what things you like, and who you like, but it shows how many times you were the first to like an item, and introduce it to the community.


Searching for Twitter Shows It's Not Yet Been Added

And should you be the first to like something, Likaholix helps you fill out your data profile with a description, and even images or videos pulled from Google to help round out your item.


Introducing a New Like to Likaholix



A Friend's Profile on Likaholix
Like with FriendFeed, your stream of likes and comments are found on your profile. You can also see how many different people liked an item, and who they are, and see recommended items based on what you've told the system you like. You can also view how many other users of the service you like, and who likes you.

Find yourself an expert in something? Claim you are with Likaholix - whether you're one of the previously mentioned social media experts, or if you have a love for science fiction, SEO or even art. Claiming expertise puts a star next to your profile, and will display your name with a star beside it anywhere it is mentioned, including on the list of contacts your friends have.


Tudor Bosman - Science Fiction Tastemaker on Likaholix
The core focus of Likaholix is to recommend to you more things you might like, based on things you say you enjoy, and those items your friends do - developing an automatic recommendation engine of sorts. For example, this morning, I was told I probably would like TiVo, because Sanjeev Singh, who I have liked, says he likes TiVo as well. In this case, Likaholix is right. It's not always right of course. I have less of an interest in bebe.com (a fashion Web site) or Downtown Brown beer (considering I don't drink), but I assume that as I like more things, and my friends do as well, this list can get better honed.

And as you like items, you can even share them in the usual places, like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed - extending the reach of the site.

Likaholix is opening up today in a private alpha mode, as they say. Existing users, like me, can invite friends to try out the service. The user interface is spartan for now, but the team has no doubt been working on the recommendation engine for starters, and a sharper GUI can come later.

You can find me at: http://likaholix.com/louisgray. Be one of the first 200 to use this code, and you can get in as well: http://burnurl.com/xdB3aH