Just when I started thinking we already had enough social networks and online communities, I suddenly came across Likaholix, the latest project developed by Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan – former Google Product Manager and Google Senior Staff Engineer, respectively.
Likaholix is an online service that lets you share personal recommendations. It can be connected with your Gmail contacts and Facebook friends, and is also linked to Amazon, Wikipedia and other reference sites to provide information about each item you mark as liked and also each item you’re recommended by the system.
So how does Likaholix work? First of all, you have to request an account code because the site is still at a private beta stage, but that shouldn’t take long – I got mine only a couple of hours after requesting it. As soon as you fill in the personal details in your user account, you can start adding items you like.
The best thing about Likaholix is that you can share recommendations about virtually anything: from food to gadgets, including books, shops, movies, TV shows and restaurants. Once you’ve added a few items you like, you’ll being getting recommendations as well. Each item is featured on its own page, with user comments, images, videos and links to reference sites. Besides, you can become a Tastemaker in any topic you’re passionate about. This means that your likes in certain categories will be recommended to other users as a valuable opinion about selected products.
Likaholix is the kind of web service that gets better with time: the more you use it, the more accurate recommendations you get. Also, it’s a great way to meet people who share the same interests as you, and whose opinions may help you decide between one product or another. What I missed is having some way to integrate this functionality in other networks or apps. I don’t see myself opening up Likaholix every time I want to say I like something. Instead, it would be great to be able to use from a little desktop widget, a Facebook embedded app or even a Firefox bookmarklet.
