Recommendation Engine FeedHub Launches Product Updates

The recommendations market continues to grow as more content hits the Web. Each service has a slightly different take on how to solve the problem. FeedHub is a company that launched last September at DEMO and tackles recommendations with regards to feed management. I met with FeedHub VP Business Development and Product Management Sean Ammirati last week at my office to discuss the product updates launching today. Sean started by explaining that FeedHub’s mission is to "do recommendations really, really well."

First they have added a thumbs up/down rating to every post inside of the customized feed they provide for you. This helps FeedHub to contiunously keep adjusting the recommendations based on your likes and dislikes. The second part is very cool and actually got me thinking about how else it could be applied. If you use Firefox to read your feeds and use Bloglines, NewsGator Online or Google Reader, they have created an extension which allows you to hit the thumbs without it loading another browser window. Sean says they are working with other feed readers to add this type of functionality as well. One can only hope that we get some updates to how feeds are handled with regards to monetization.

Here is an example of the thumbs using Google Reader:

Part two of the service update is around categorization. They have switched the taxonomy from DMOZ to begin leveraging Wikipedia for category memes. Lastly, they are using microformats to recommend posts with significantly more comments than are typical for other posts from that source.

The last service update are infrastructure improvements. Sean says the biggest change is an upgrade to the Dojo Toolkit to version 1.0. The Dojo Toolkit is one of the most popular Javascript toolkits. A toolkit is basically a set of premade code which can help reduce build time versus creating from scratch.

Check out my discussion with FeedHub about their revenue models – one of them might be considered a bit controversial. and our initial review from DEMO.

Here’s an overview video the FeedHub team created to show you how to use the Firefox extension: