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.

I just want to say I haven’t been as lazy as the frequency of my blog posts would suggest. I’ve been working on improving Emmy’s recommendations and enlarging her knowledge base. If everything goes well, the next version of Emmy’s index will be available in several weeks. I have also been tackling some other issues regarding this project, but I won’t go in too many details right now. All I can say for now is expect an improving service and keep exploring your taste.

Searching for TasteKid on Google no longer triggers a “Did you mean: Taste Kid” message (with the blank space between “taste” and “kid”).

A couple of days ago, an article featuring TasteKid made it up to Digg’s main page. This triggered an “emergency landing” on Delicious’s main page, too. Around the same time, this happen. Then this. Then, others followed.

A couple of weeks ago I’ve started doing some changes on Emmy’s learning processes. What am I trying to do is basically increasing Emmy’s knowledge base and providing better quality recommendations.

This new redesigned engine is currently in testing, and it will take some time until its knowledge will be used on the public version of TasteKid. If everything goes well, I expect this to happen in about a month or so.

I will describe in further depth these updates when that time will come. Until then, Emmy continues to improve herself using the existing engine. Some of the time constrains are related to the limitations of the available hardware, so I think I will open myself a little bit more to sponsorship opportunities in the near future.

Today, TasteKid won third prize at Webstock Awards 2008, a Romanian Web 2.0 contest, within the “Utility” category. Thank you Cristian Manafu for suggesting me to participate in this contest. It was a pleasent experience :)