We are excited to announce a major update that enables our users to get games recommendations based on what (games) they already like, besides music, movies, TV-shows, books and authors. Moreover, registered users can now “like”, “dislike”, “save” and “meh” games as well, keeping track of them on their profiles and getting personalized recommendations for games, by selecting the newly added “Games” tab on their home page. Please note that, since this is a new type of resource, the games recommendations might still be inconsistent in some cases, but, with time, our system will improve and learn from your preferences, and TasteKid will provide better and better recommendations for games, too.

While we may not be able to get back to all our users that send us feedback, we are definitely listening. Providing recommendations for games was by far the most requested feature in recent months. As we previously done with the “Meh” feature, which was also frequently requested, we followed up and implemented your demand. We hope you like it and find it useful!

During the past couple of months, we have been closely monitoring our site speed and overall performance. We are aware there were times when the site was slow due to the increasing number of visits, and we definitely realise how annoying this can be for you, our users.

I wanted to let everyone know we are aware of this issue and have been working hard on improving the site performance. While this is an ongoing problem which doesn’t have an ultimate solution, by implementing a series of optimizations that we have gradually deployed during the past weeks, we significantly improved the average response times. However, these are still high during peak hours, so we will continue to look into ways for further improvements.

Also, you can expect an improvement in the quality of our recommendations in the next couple of weeks, so we hope you will continue the journey of exploring your taste, and that your experience will become better and better.

We want to give our users precisely the tools they need to explore their taste. We listen carefully to the feedback we receive through our contact form, and many times decide what our priorities should be based on that.

Over time, many users have specifically requested a particular feature. While the request has been formulated in various ways, the basic idea is the same: registered users want a way to express indifference regarding a particular resource, without having to Like, Dislike or Save it. This is especially useful for the items presented in the “Recommended for you” section – which contains personalized recommendations. Many times, users were already aware of the bands, movies, etc. presented in this section, and wanted a way to remove them in order to get other personalized recommendations. And this is exactly what the new Meh action does.

Meh’ing something, by pressing the new Meh button next to the already familiar Like, Dislike and Save buttons will remove that particular resource from future recommendations, without adding it to the Like, Dislike or Saved profile lists. However, users can view their individual Meh’d items while visiting their own profile.

We hope this new feature will make it even easier to discover new interesting things and receive better, more accurate personalized recommendations.

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!

Based on feedback from our users, we have decided to change the way the tooltip containing information for each resource (artist, movie, book) is triggered to appear on TasteKid.com. Until now, the tooltip appeared every time you were hovering any of the information icons (”?”) next to each resource. Now, you have to click on the icons in order for the tooltip to appear. Some users have reported being annoyed by the tooltip appearing just because they were unintentionally hovering the information icons (”?”).

This is a small change, but we felt like announcing it because people that were used to the old way of getting additional information for artists, movies and books from TasteKid might get confused at first.

Since just a few days ago, TasteKid is also available on Facebook, as an application. TasteKid has been around on Facebook for some time as a fan page, but now, for all Facebook users out there, you can actually use the music, movies and books recommendation engine directly from you beloved social platform.

Simple and fast, just like the website itself, TasteKid’s Facebook app gives you on-spot recommendations for music, movies and books, based on what you like. It also remembers your search, so next time you use it, you will receive the recommendations directly, without having to type in all your favorite stuff again (you can also do this on the main website by using the “Remember” option).

Launching this Facebook application is part of our efforts to make this recommendation service available as easily as possible to people all over the world, who may be already using and being fond of various social platforms and services and could find using TasteKid in a familiar environment more attractive.

Our previous endeavor in this direction was the recent launch of TasteKid’s Twitter bot, which is gathering more and more followers each day. Thank you! :)