Not the Crowd, Just You

One of the great advantages of the Internet is that you can gather the opinions of many with the click of a button. Want to know the most popular songs by Taylor Swift? Spotify will show you. Want to see the places everyone goes in New York City? Yelp will tell you.

The problem is…well sometimes the crowd is dumb. I mean, if you ask the crowd, hundreds of thousands of tourists will tell you that Times Square is the coolest place in New York City, or that Ghirardelli Square is a must-see place in San Francisco.

So as much as crowd-sourced opinions are helpful, what I want to know is what YOU recommend. Tell me the songs you’re listening to, the shows you watch on TV. What restaurants have you checked out lately and which ones are ones I would like.

You know me. You know what I like.

The personal recommendations between two people are more fun. And interestingly, they’re also more valuable. If you’re riding in a car and a friend plays you a song, you tell them what you think right there. Then you play him a track, and so on. Soon you know where your taste intersects and you’ve discovered a bunch of new songs together. I have friends I’ve bonded with over music taste for years! if a friend makes you her favorite cocktail, you’ll try it. If you like it, it might be the thing you share together.

And when you’re traveling to a new place, you might reach out to a friend who has been there and ask for recommendations for what to see and do while you’re there. Several of my friends consider themselves experts on places they like to visit, so much so that they keep an email of all their recommendations that they send to their friends who are visiting. So while the internet is filled with great services for finding out what the crowd recommends (Yelp, Spotify, Google Places, etc.), we still resort to texts, emails and Facebook posts for getting more personal recommendations from friends.

Is it possible to make a service that brings your friends’s recommendations to you right as you need them? That depends on whether your friends also use the service and count on it. It has to be fun, playful, and popular. No one likes a social network that feels like a ghost town. The more you get your friends to participate, the more value it will have for you.

We’ll soon be launching a new recommendations-based social network. Sure it can bring you personal recommendations from friends, but that will only happen if it’s fun to use and you tell everyone you know. I hope you love it!