TasteKid's Blog

Since we released the latest version of the service, people have started to take advantage of all the new features available to registered users. While creating a taste profile, saving favorite bands, movies, etc. and getting personalized recommendations is useful and fun, it can be an even more interesting discovery experience to check out other people’s profiles.

In order to provide a better way to discover interesting profiles, we recently launched a new feature, that was suggested in various forms by several users, most notably by Vlad Verde.

The new feature consists in presenting registered users with other profiles, labeled as “Party Buddies”, “Popcorn Buddies” and “Library Buddies”. These are profiles of users that share common interests with the current user, in terms of music, movies or books. These profile selections are available on the mainpage and alternate with the “Active members” selection. Of course, this feature is available provided the user is logged in and has “liked” some items.

If you like TasteKid and think it can help some of your friends explore their taste too, you can now easily invite them to check it out. If you log in by connecting with your Facebook account, click on the “Invite your friends” button from the left side of your own profile page to open the Facebook dialog.

Alternatively, if you log in using a GMail account, you have a similar option (”Invite GMail contacts”) that you can use to send quick invites to some of your GMail contacts. By using this feature you can also find your connections that are already on TasteKid, so you can check out their profiles.

TasteKid now has its own Android App! Once installed, the application provides quick recommendations on any Android device, without the need of launching the browser. The Android app’s functionality is similar to the website’s main feature, providing recommendations based on band names, movie, TV show or book titles, and author names. Also, the additional description and Youtube clip (where present) are also available within the Android app.

You can mark any item as “favorite” (look for the star), so you can save it for future reference – favorite items are available when pressing the “Favorites” button.

Also, after enabling TasteKid as a searchable item from your phone menu, you can search TasteKid directly from your home screen. Enjoy!

A month has passed since we launched the new version of our service. We are thrilled to see how users have embraced the new features, proving our assumption that these are helpful and easy to use.

“Liking” and “Disliking” bands, movies, etc. on TasteKid is now a common action for registered users, that are refining their personalized recommendations and maintaining their taste profile by performing such actions. Some users have even surpassed our expectations regarding the number of items rated. Take Sean for example, who has already rated over 1,000 items, and so makes us think of ways to display only a fraction of the rated items on the profile. This is good news.

During the past month, besides making small improvements and fixes, we have also introduced some new features, which include:

Vanity URLs: Users can now set up a username from their account settings and then have a tastekid.com/username profile URL. For example, here’s my profile page: http://www.tastekid.com/andrei.

Highlighting common items: This feature was suggested by a few users, and we decided to implement it. Now, when viewing another user’s profile, the items that you have in common are highlighted.

Searching on Netflix: A new way of watching the recommended movies or TV shows is through Netflix. When hovering the “GET” tab from the movie/shows details page or tooltip, users now have to option to search for that particular movie/show on Netflix.

I would like to thank all the users that send us feedback, helping us fix bugs and introduce cool new features. We are already working on some of these, but for now, all I can say is stay tuned for surprises in the near future!

We are excited to announce the launch of our new website.

First of all, TasteKid now has a new interface, that has been carefully redesigned for a better user experience, and is addressing most of the issues some of you have brought to our attention during the past months.

Besides the new interface, TasteKid now has important and useful personalization and interaction features that add a new dimension to the discovery experience.

All users are now able to create a free account or to connect with TasteKid using their Facebook account. Once logged in, a member can:

- Get better, personalized recommendations
- Save newly discovered and favorite items
- Maintain and share a taste profile
- Interact with other TasteKid users, “like” their profiles
- See and easily repeat previous searches
- Exchange opinions on any bands, movies, etc.

While our main focus remains giving top quality on spot recommendations for music, movies, shows, books and authors, we strongly feel all these new features complement our basic search function in a way that enables our users to explore their tastes in new ways, and discover even more things they will hopefully enjoy.

For those of you who haven’t already noticed, we have recently launched a free iPhone App. Using TasteKid’s app you can get music, movies, shows, books and authors recommendations straight on your iPhone, without having to launch the browser and visit the TasteKid.com website.

Having an intuitive and easy to use interface especially designed for the iPhone, the app provides the same functionality as the website. You can type in your favorite bands, movie or show titles, books and authors, and you get instant recommendations of things you might enjoy, based on what you already like. You can even watch the Youtube clips or read the Wikipedia excerpts available on the website.

You can read more on the app’s page, or go straight to the Apple store to download it (it’s free!).

For those of you who are Android users, stay tuned, as we are also working on an Android app.

Just like any other search engine, TasteKid needs a lot of effort and dedication to keep the recommendations (search results) up to date and improving.

While we haven’t wrote on this blog in a while, rest assured we are constantly working on what we think counts most for our users: the quality of TasteKid’s recommendations.

The latest changes we have deployed include, besides important steps towards overall improvement of our recommendations, some new features that we hope you will find useful:

1. Users are now able to search for shows, and get recommendations for other shows they might enjoy: http://www.tastekid.com/ask?f=1&q=Lost%2C+Prison+Break

2. TasteKid now officially supports searching for both books and authors

3. Some issues regarding titles that contain commas have been resolved. The comma is usually used by users to separate multiple search terms, so when someone was searching for, let’s say, “Girl, Interrupted”, the system might have interpreted that as two different items, “Girl” and “Interrupted”: http://www.tastekid.com/ask?f=1&q=Girl%2C+Interrupted%2C+Guns%2C+Germs%2C+And+Steel

We have also deployed significant under-the-hood changes that are adding consistency and relevancy to our recommendations.

Stay tuned, and keep exploring your taste!

We are happy to announce that we finally deployed the update we have been (silently) working on for the last couple of months.

The most important aspect of this update is that now Emmy is even smarter: she knows about more artists, bands, movies, authors and books, than ever before. She gives better recommendations for a large variety of inputs, and the suggestions are generally cleaner and more to the point. Of course, there still is a lot to do in order to improve her awareness, but this has been an important step forward.

Also, the Wikipedia teasers and the Youtube clips are more accurate now, and the number of situations in which the wrong info is shown for a particular resource has been drastically decreased. Still, because such situations may still occur, we have introduced a new feature: user reporting. This feature allows the users to easily report such a mistake and recommend a more suitable Wikipedia article or Youtube clip for that particular resource. Using this valuable feedback that we have already begun receiving, we are hoping to increase the accuracy of Emmy’s infos even more.

Just so you won’t have to type “Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” or “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, we have introduced the auto-complete: each time you start typing a new resource as input for Emmy’s recommendations, the auto-complete will suggest some of the more popular names that begin with those letters.

All these, along with some other more subtle front-end and back-end improvements, are part of our efforts to provide you with the best recommendation engine for music, movies and books, that you can find. And we’ll continue to do that.

In order to make it more obvious for the new users that, besides recommendations, TasteKid also provides additional data related to the recommended items (Wikipedia teasers, Youtube clips), the tooltip now opens automatically in some circumstances.

For example, if a visitor clicks on a resource within the TasteKid.com website, besides getting recommendations for that particular resource, he/she will also be provided with additional info on that artist, movie or book, without having to click the info icon (”?”). Other situations include visitors coming from of of TasteKid’s “Artist of the Day”/”Movie of the Day”/”Book/Author of the day” tweets, or from Facebook, when the item was shared using the option available within each resource’s additional info tooltip (the “Share on Facebook” link).

This change has been performed after getting some feedback from users that apparently haven’t noticed the info icons or they were reluctant to click on them.

That’s right, from now on, when you discover something interesting on TasteKid, you can share it on Facebook. The “Share on Facebook” link is available within the tooltip that appears when you click the question mark shaped icon near each resource.

If you choose to share, the Youtube clip that you have enjoyed together with a short preview of the associated Wikipedia article will be presented by Facebook in your stream (of course, you can change that in the Facebook sharing pop-up).

Sharing is love. Enjoy!