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MyFriendSuggests.com Joins New Rewards Program

We are pleased to announce that MyFriendSuggests.com has joined the MyPerkPlace Perk Network.

MyPerkPlace is a brand new website that aims to allow other websites to reward it’s users for contributing and participating in the growth of a website. For us, that means you get rewarded for things like rating places, adding your comments and inviting friends. For each action you take you earn Perk Points, the Perk Points you earn at MyFriendSuggests.com are then combined with Perk Points you earn at other Perk Network members sites. You then can redeem the points for great rewards, such as gift cards to Circuit City, Amazon.com, Best Buy and many more great stores.

So what’s the catch? Well nothing really - all you do is use MyFriendSuggests.com and earn points, we then notify MyPerkPlace.com about your points and when you earn enough you redeem them! No one ever asks for your credit card and it never costs you a penny (it does cost us some money but it’s our way of saying thanks for helping to grow MyFriendSuggests.com). What’s even better is you don’t even have to sign up for anything, we handle that for you! Over the next week you will get an email with your MyPerkPlace.com login and your transfered balance based on your previous MyFriendSuggests.com activity. You can learn more about our new point program by clicking here.

A few other notes. MyFriendSuggests.com is the first member of the MyPerkPlace.com Perk Network, so at this time you can only earn points through MyFriendSuggests.com, we hope this changes very shortly. MyPerkPlace.com is currently operating under their beta program so some issues may occur during this time period. Also, in good faith we think it’s important to mention that the same people who built MyFriendSuggests.com also built MyPerkPlace.com, however we are treating the two as very seperate sites and MyFriendSuggests.com is treated as just another memer of the Perk Network. Also, per this announcement our privacy policy has been updated.

Thanks,

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Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives Map

One of my favorite shows on Food TV is Diner’s, Drive In’s and Dives.  The show features Guy Fieri going around the US to great diners, drive ins and dives.  I decided in to add a special google map of Guy’s favorite suggestions to our suggestion site, MyFriendSuggests.com.  You can see the map of Guy’s favorite places by clicking here.

Don’t forget to register for an account at MyFriendSuggests.com and get your own personalized suggestions for local restaurants, bars, hotels and of course Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives!

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MyFriendSuggests integrates with Google Base

MyFriendSuggests is proud to announce that it has integrated itself with Google Base to provide its users with a more exciting experience.  By bulk loading reviews from Google Base, MyFriendSuggests.com has been able to add 1000’s of reviews to help improve its suggestion and recommendation algorithm that provides personalized suggestions based on user’s personal tastes and their friend network. 

User’s of the site are recommended to Rate Places, asap so they can begin to have more accurate recommendations and suggestions delivered to their doorstep. 

The feed from Google Base will be loading places city by city.  So far feeds for Long Island, NY and Minneapolis, MN have been complete, with many others on the way.  If you’d like your city bulk loaded, please contact us at info [at] myfriendsuggests dot com.

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My Friend Suggests on FACEBOOK!

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!

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).

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Announcement: Launch of Mobile.MyFriendSuggests.com

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.

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Free Resources for Promoting your new website

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!

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Re-Release: MyFriendSuggests.com

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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NFL Tracker

Sorry for the delay but unfortunately NFL Tracker is no longer working.  The data source we used has changed its format and we need to go back to the drawing board.  Unfortunately I can’t give an estimate of when or if we will get this back working as our time dedicated to NFL Tracker is limited.

Thanks for understanding.

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Personalized Restaurant and Bar Recommendations
Introducing MyFriendSuggests.com

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

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