TasteKid has a strong social component. However, the structure of this layer and the features we provide differentiate from other networks, and some of you might wonder why. I’m writing this post to address this question, and to briefly explain our social guidelines.

The interaction between registered users on TasteKid is designed to be taste-centered. We intentionally avoid features that would allow searching for other users by name, age, sex, school, location, or other such parameters. Instead, for each band, movie, etc., one can easily see which other users like or dislike that particular item, and check those users’ profiles – and maybe “like” them. Moreover, registered users see, on their home page, a list of “Popcorn” or “Party” buddies, which are users that share similar taste in movies or music (these lists are presented alternatively with the “Active members” list).

The main idea is that users on TasteKid should easily discover each other and connect based on their shared preferences and taste in music, movies, shows and literature, rather than other factors. That being said, we are looking forward to designing and implementing new features that would improve the taste-centered user discovery process. But the main concept remains a taste-based interaction, because all we want to do is help our users explore their taste – nothing more, nothing less.

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.

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.

As for today, Emmy is also available on Twitter. This Twitter bot is presented as an alternative for the main website, especially for all you Twitter addicts out there :)

How it works: just tweet something like :”@tastekid the beatles, madonna” and, in about 30 seconds, you should receive a reply with Emmy’s recommendations for The Beatles and Madonna. I’ve just released this bot, so, if you notice any bugs or anything that doesn’t seem to work, I would appreciate if you would drop me a line.

Hope this helps!

I’ve implemented a new feature that I hope will prove to be helpful: each time you search for something, just underneath the big search input, you’ll find a small “Remember” link – press it, and Emmy will remember your query (you can tell her to forget it afterwards).

This way, if you have entered many bands, movies and books (in one search), to better describe your taste and to get more recommendations, you won’t have to re-type all your favourite stuff next time you visit Emmy. It’s like a very straightforward profile-saving function. One thing though, Emmy is able to remember just one of your searches at a time, so telling her to “remember” something will make her “forget” about any previous remembered searches. I hope you’ll like it :)

A couple of days ago I have uploaded a series of updates that I have been working on for a while.

The most important update probably is Emmy’s knowledge base itself, that I have rebuilt from scratch. It is definitely more comprehensive and accurate now, and I truly hope this reflects in the quality of Emmy’s recommendations. I am aware that some of the users may still be disappointed with her results, but I am making efforts to improve her ability to provide relevant recommendations to more and more different inquiries.

Besides giving better suggestions, Emmy is now able to provide further information for the majority of the stuff she recommends. Until this update, only a limited number of resources had a Wikipedia description available. Now, for almost all the bands, movies, and, for the first time, for books also, Emmy is happy to present you the begging of the Wikipedia article of that particular resource. This way, I hope you will be able to make a better first impression on the things suggested to you.

Some less visible updates have been made also. For example, you can now search for up to 20 items (given as input to Emmy), separated by commas. Up until now, the limit was 10 items, and the few of you who actually tried to give her 10 bands, movies and/or books to better describe your taste, would have probably experienced a longer execution time. Now, Emmy is able to grasp, process and make her recommendations upon your input much faster, and for double to number of resources given as input.

Another less visible update is that now Emmy, besides improving her “Did you mean” feature, has also learned some common spelling mistakes and abbreviations.

To give you just a few examples: beatles, bjork, alanis morriset, linkinpark, rhcp, amélie, lotr, soad, beethoven.

A useful update is that you can now specify the type of your input, and also request a type for the recommended items. There are cases when the same name can stand for a band name and for a movie title in the same time, for example. Now, if Emmy assumes wrong about what you are trying to tell her that you like, you can mention her the type by using the “band:”, “movie:” or “book:” operators.

For example: band:underworld, movie:harry potter, book:trainspotting.

Also, you can specify what type of stuff you want to receive as recommendations, that is, band and artists, movies or books. This can be useful in many cases, interesting, and fun to play with sometimes.

For example: the beatles//movies, fight club//music, pulp fiction//books.

There is still a lot of work to do in order to make Emmy wise enough to provide the vast majority of her users with interesting, relevant recommendations they haven’t heard of before, but I hope these updates will prove to be a step forward in accomplishing this mission.

I’ve just uploaded a few changes regarding the tooltip that appears when you hover the “?” icons near Emmy’s results.

First of all, the script behind this tooltip now makes use of the YouTube Data API Protocol for retrieving relevant videos for each band or movie. Yes, I admit, I should have done this in the first place instead of parsing the HTML of the search results page. Besides being more elegant and definitely faster, this new approach solves a problem that I was confronting with for quite a while: retrieving only embeddable movies. Some of the movies that Emmy was showing, if played, where displaying the “This movie is no longer available” message. I hated this message, and I’m sure some of the users found it very annoying, too. This was due to the fact that the YouTube user that uploaded that movie specified that the movie is not embeddable (cannot be embed on other sites). Using the “format” custom parameter for performing the search with the Data API enabled me to search only for movies that CAN be embed (this option isn’t available for searches performed on the YouTube site).

Another thing is that the tooltip no longer disappers when you move the mouse out of it, as it has been designed to do until now. You have to click on the “Close [X]” link in order to close it. This way, a user can watch and listen to a music video/movie trailer while doing other things with his/her mouse, instead of having to keep it in the tooltip area.

I hope you will find these updates helpful :)

P.S.: I would also recommend SimplePie for parsing Atom feeds. Although I’ve ran into a couple of problems, it finally worked out like a charm.

It is my believe that users are looking for simple, though useful applications. Although my recommendation engine was providing users with suggestions in terms of music, movies and books, they had to perform the time-consuming operation of looking up on Google or specialized entertainment websites each and every one of these suggested resources in order to find out more about them.

Users should be able to easily find out more about Emmy’s suggestions, so, to simplify this process, I came up with the tooltip idea: A small “?”-shaped icon near each suggestion, that, upon mouse-over, triggers a tool-tip that displays information about that particular item.

I wrote a script that grabs information about bands and movies from Wikipedia, but I still have to validate each and every one of these teasers due to some non-standard issues that lead to grabbing the wrong articles every once in a while. I started with the most popular resources, and as for today, Emmy know about a couple of thousand items.

After a while, I thought that this can be furthered improved by presenting the user with a YouTube video regarding each resource. A song for music, a movie trailer for movies.

This way, he or she can now make a first impression about every one of Emmy’s suggestions, without having to perform a single click.

I still have some further improvements for the preview tooltip on my todo list, like a mechanism for preventing “no longer available” movies to appear.

Note: This post has been written in retrospect and posted on September 11th, 2008.