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Archive for category MyFriendSuggests

My Friend Suggests on FACEBOOK!

Oct 22

Posted by fmapap in MyFriendSuggests | No Comments

We are proud to announce our first version of MyFriendSuggests for Facebook.

The facebook application allows you to link your MyFriendSuggests account to your facebook account. Here are a few of the features that the application offers:

  • Easy Access to your MFS points as well as notifications for new messages and friend requests.
  • Personalized suggestions delivered to you through facebook
  • See what other friends have recently rated.

To learn more check out our Facebook Page on MyFriendSuggests.

Thanks and we look forward to your feeback.

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How to get the most out of My Friend Suggests.com!

Oct 20

Posted by fmapap in MyFriendSuggests, Website Marketing | No Comments

 


How to get the most out of MyFriendSuggests.com?


If you’ve found yourself to this page you’ve probably tried our site MyFriendSuggests.com, if not go try it now and come back here after.  As a new site we are encourage you to submit feedback about what you like, what you don’t like and what you want us to change.  Feel free to email us any comments at info [at] myfriendsuggests.com.

We also want to provide you with some feedback on how we think you can best enjoy MyFriendSuggests.com.  Here is our list of the top 5 things you need to do to enjoy MyFriendSuggests.com:

1)      REGISTER – I can’t stress this enough if your not registered (and logged in) you cannot take advantage of personalized recommendations, our personalized newsletter, our similarity meters and many other great features.  Without being logged in our site is just like so many other local search sites, so please register and login today.

2)      Add and Invite Friends – Once your registered you need to add some friends to your friend network.  Your friend network helps you (and us) find places you’re friends (and their friends) have enjoyed.  It also enables you to learn about where members of your friend network have tried and learn from those experience.  The more friends you add to our site the more personalized your experience will be.

3)      Rate Places – The #1 factor in our suggestion algorithm are the places you’ve rated on our site.  We use these places (along with other factors) to accurately predict how well you will like places you haven’t been.  The more places you rate the more accurate our predictions.  Remember you can rate places by just clicking the red stars on just about any screen throughout the site.  Also don’t forget to add suggestions for places that aren’t yet on our site.

4)      Add Favorite Neighborhoods – Favorite Neighborhoods allow us to know about which places you’re interested in getting suggestions for.  If you live in San Francisco with no plans on ever going to Omaha Nebraska I doubt you want restaurant suggestions there.  We recommend you add cities near your home, work and places you frequently travel to (for business or pleasure).   To add a favorite neighborhood just login and from your home page click the “Add Neighborhood” Link.

5)      Read our newsletter – Your favorite neighborhoods also generated the content to your personalized newsletter.  Learn about new places to try and get personalized suggestions sent to you.  Your newsletter should come about every 2 weeks.  Be sure to read it for other important news about our site.

We hope these tips help make using MyFriendSuggests.com easier and more enjoyable.  Don’t hesitate to give us feedback on what we can do to make the site better (send emails to info @ myfriendsuggests.com).

MyFriendSuggests Web 2.0

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Announcement: Launch of Mobile.MyFriendSuggests.com

Oct 9

Posted by fmapap in MyFriendSuggests | No Comments

We’re proud to announce the first version of our mobile site, http://mobile.myfriendsuggests.com.

Imagine your in the middle of New York City and you want to find a bar close by that matches your personal tastes; with Mobile.MyFriendSuggests.com that’s no problem.

As part of our first release users will be able to search for places and get personalized suggestions* right from their phone.  We also include a feature that will generate a KML file that can be imported into Google Maps for Mobile. 

 *Note: to take advantage of personalized suggestions you need to login with your user account.  Also you must have rated enough places for our suggestion algorithm to compute recommendations.  We suggest that you first register and use our standard site, http://www.myfriendsuggests.com, before using our mobile version for maximum value.

As always we look forward to your feedback.

google maps local search Mobile mobile apps MyFriendSuggests restaurants WAP

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Free Resources for Promoting your new website

Oct 4

Posted by fmapap in MyFriendSuggests, Website Marketing | No Comments

I am in the processing of promoting our new webiste, MyFriendSuggests.com.  I’ve been keeping track of different resources I’ve used to help promote the site and figured it was worth sharing in hopes that others would share back any sites I missed.  I’m only including sitest that are 1) Free, 2) Simple to use and 3) shown to have at least some success.  I’ll try to categorize them as well… I’d love for you to post a comment if you have addition resources, I’ll be happy to update the list with your resource and even give you and your site credit for it!

UPDATE! 

I’ve added some new sites thanks to the folks at CupidsLab.com.

If you have more great sites than send them to us and we’ll add you site to the list.

 Web 2.0 Site Listings

KillerStartups.Com  – this worked best for me.
Listio.com
SimpleSpark.com
NetWebApp.com
BuzzShout.com
Go2Web20.net
2.0websites.com
pr.odigio.us
coolsitecollection.com
wikkidapps.com

Bookmarking Sites – haven’t had much with these in way of promoting traffic.

Del.icio.us
Furl.net
Simpy.com
ma.gnolia.com

News / Blog Entry – I usually post blog entries related to changes on the site.

Digg.com
Reddit.com
Shoutwire.com
StumbleUpon.com
Blinklist.com

Posted on Message Boards (for reviews mainly, but this helps get some people on the site) 

SitePoint.com
StartupNation.com
TechCrunch.com

Other Stuff

Listible.com
CoolSiteOfTheDay.com
dmoz.org/

 I also looked into press releases, but none of the free ones seemed to help much.

Again, I look forward to your thoughts!

Marketing Promoting Web 2.0 Website

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Re-Release: MyFriendSuggests.com

Sep 26

Posted by fmapap in MyFriendSuggests | No Comments

We’re proud to announce the release of the new and improved MyFriendSuggest.com.  We’ve totally overhauled the look and feel of the site making it more pleasant to view and easier to use.  We’ve added some great new functionality as well such as tagging, “tell a friend”, the ability to quickly and easily rate places and many other new features.

MyFriendSuggests.com is more than just a local search engine, it allows you to build a friend network that, along with your personal preferences, will allow us to use our unique suggestion engine to recommend places YOU will like.  Imagine your travelling to a city for the first time and instead of taking recommendations from people that are nothing like you we’ll recommend places based on your tastes and the tastes and recommendations of your friends.  It’s very similar to how Amazon can recommend you a book, but we do it for all types of places such as restaurants, bars, clubs, grocery stores, hotels and more. 

 As a new site we are interested in your feedback about the site!  Feel free to let us know what you think could make the site better. 

 Thanks and be sure to tell a friend about our site.

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Personalized Restaurant and Bar Recommendations
Introducing MyFriendSuggests.com

Jul 17

Posted by fmapap in MyFriendSuggests, Web Development | No Comments

We are please to announce the official launching of MyFriendSuggests.com a social networking site that provides you personalized suggestions for restaurants, bars, clubs, doctors, grocery stores and just about anything else you can think of.  Unlike other sites where you may find yourself digging through 100’s of reviews from people who may be nothing like you MyFriendSuggests.com provides you a much more personalized experience.

 So how does it work?

  • First you build your friend network.  Add and invite your closest friends, we’ll add their friends, and their friend’s friends (and so on) to your network, sort of like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon.
  • Then rate your favorite places (restauarants, bars, clubs, doctors, etc).  Rating is as simple as clicking the stars next to a places name.  Also you can add new suggestions by clicking Make Suggestion.  The more places you rate the more accurate our suggestions.
  • Using our proprietary formula we will create suggestions based on your ratings, the ratings of people like you and those in your friend network.  These suggestions will be JUST for YOU, based on YOUR preferences.
  • Also while searching throughout the site you’ll be able to easily see which other users are in your friend network and which users have similar tastes to you. 

We’ve also got some other great features such as:

  • Favorite Neighborhoods allows you to quickly see the new recommendations for your favorite neighborhoods as well as who the experts are for that area.
  • Neighborhood Messages allow you to post a question about a given area.  Maybe your new to town and want advice on a gardner or barbershop. 
  • Friend Messaging allows you to directly message anyone (or all) of the people in your friend network to ask them a question directly.
  • Our Newsletter will send you an email letting you know about new suggestions in your favorite neighborhoods AND any personalized suggestions we come up with using our recommendation system.
  • More great features coming soon!

Since we are a new site we need your help filling up our suggestions and ratings so that we can provide the most accurate recommendations possible.  Register today and invite some friends!

 If you have any thoughts or questions feel free to contact us at info at MyFriendSuggests.com

friend network MyFriendSuggests restaurants social networking suggestions Web 2.0

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Creating a custom recommender using taste

May 29

Posted by fmapap in Java, MyFriendSuggests, Taste | No Comments

Taste is a great framework for collaborative filtering.  We are going to be launching a new recommendation algorithm on our site (MyFriendSuggests.com) in the coming weeks (Stay Tuned!) based on the Taste framework.  Taste provides a User-based and Item-based recommender.  User based recommenders find users that have similiar tastes to you and then use their ratings to predict how you might rate a given item.  Item based recommenders find items that are similar to each others and use those similar items to predict how you might rate a given item.  In our testing we found that a recommender that uses both types of recommenders would be most effective.  Basically we use the following formulat to predict user u’s rating of object x.

P(u,x) = alpha*uRec(u,x) + (1-alpha) * iRec(u,x)

Where alpha is a constant between 0 and 1 (basically weighting the two recommenders) and uRec and iRec are the Taste User and Item based recommenders.

Using the Taste evaluators you can build a simple program to find the bast value of alpha for your application.  Since we still have very sparse data we are leaving the value 0.50 until we have more data to work with.  In the next few days I’ll be posting some more on how I used taste to build our recommender.

collaborative filtering java Programming recommender taste Web 2.0

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Scraping Hotmail for Contacts using JScrape

May 5

Posted by fmapap in Java, MyFriendSuggests, Scraping, Website Marketing | 3 Comments

As we’ve seen in my posts for scraping AOL, GMail and Yahoo, each site has its own “tricks” that make it challenging to scrape contact information from.  The final site in this series of posts is for Hotmail.  Hotmail is one of the trickier ones.  As I did with the previous posts I’m going to outline some of the trickier parts of scraping the site.

After posting to Hotmail.com you need to parse all the hidden parameters on the form, you will need to repost those parameters along with the login and passwd for the user.  You also need to pass a parameter PwdPad which is generated by remove X chars from the end of the string “IfYouAreReadingThisYouHaveTooMuchFreeTime” where X is the length of the user’s password.   To determine the URL you need to parse out of the JavaScript the value of the JS variable, g_DO["hotmail.com"]. 

After posting to the URL you will need to parse some more JS, find the window.location.replace JS and use the URL in that parameter to post your next URL.  In the response you will find a mailbox ID, you can find that by looking for ‘_UM=’ in the response and parsing out the value.  From there you are home free… simply post to:  http://”+host+“/cgi-bin/addresses?”+mbox  (you can get the host by grabbing the attribute using the following code:  String host = get.getRequestHeader(“Host”).getValue(); ).

Well that’s about it.  Hopefully that helps some people out.  If you want to see this in action sign up for an account at MyFriendSuggests.com and use my version of the contact importer (and while your there try our site out and let us know what you think). 

java MyFriendSuggests Scraping Social Marketing Web 2.0

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Improving performance of Taste using DBCP

Apr 25

Posted by fmapap in Java, MyFriendSuggests, Taste, Web Development | No Comments

For the past few weeks I’ve been playing with Taste, a Java based framework for collaborative filtering (basically the recommendation feature found on sites like Amazon and Netflix).    Hopefully in the near feature this tool will be incorporated in our site, MyFriendSuggests.com to improve our suggestion algorithms. 

What I found was the initial description of using a MySQL DataSource sounded fine, but do to the heavy access to the database performance was bad.  Actually it would stop being able to find new connections since the connections were being grabbed faster than windows was cleaning up open sockets.  Simple solution to this was to use the Apache DBCP for db connection pooling.  All I needed to do was add commons-dbcp and commons-pool to my class path and then create a simple function:

public static DataSource getDataSource()
{
  BasicDataSource md = new BasicDataSource();
  md.setDriverClassName(“com.mysql.jdbc.Driver”); 
  md.setUrl(“jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/dbname”);
  md.setUsername(“user”);
  md.setPassword(“pass”);
  return md;
}

I call this method in the constructor of the MySQLJDBCDataModel class.  After doing that things started performing much better.

java MyFriendSuggests taste Technorati Web 2.0

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Cleaning up your sites URLs with the URL Rewrite Filter

Mar 31

Posted by fmapap in Java, MyFriendSuggests, Web Development | No Comments

During the development of our first ‘real’ site, http://www.myfriendsuggests.com, we never really paid too much attention to the URLs that our site was generating.  We did some reading and heard that clean URLs were important for SEO reasons but at the same time we saw the GoogleBot crawling our site just fine, so we ignored it.  After reading articles like “The Importance of a Semantic URL” we’ve decided to start the process of cleaning up our sites URLs.  Instead of using mod_rewrite which forces us to be dependent on apache, we decided to try the URL Rewrite Filter.  This tool is a Java based Servlet Filter which makes cleaning up the URLs easy.  The hard part is throughout our site we reference the old URL string.  What we’ve been doing is adding simple rewrite rules like the following:

 <rule>
<from>dest([0-9]+).html</from>
<to>/Destination.jsp?dest=$1</to>
</rule>

This rule will forward any requests to lets say dest59.html to /Destinations.jsp?dest=59 .  This part was pretty easy, but the problem was that the Destination.jsp url was found throughout our site in various forms (one of the other negatives to not setting up good conventions up front).  I’ve used PowerGrep to replace the references through the site and now am in the testing phase to make sure this all works properly.

I will continue to change a few pages over to this new cleaner URL format while we continue other development and will upate the blog to let others know if this really had a positive effect on our site as a whole. 

Plan Early

One thing I learned is that by not planning what the URLs will look like early I have to do a lot of refactoring of the site.  For anyone doing web development from scratch be sure to plan this important aspect of your site out.

java jsp MyFriendSuggests Technorati Web 2.0

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