I stumbled upon a useful site earlier today that's worth sharing. Called SimilarWeb, this small Firefox (and soon Internet Explorer) add-on sits on the side of your browser and pulls up sites that are similar to the one you're currently on.
It works remarkably well--at least with major sites. For example, visiting YouTube brings up a long list of other video hosts. The same went for social news sites like Digg, Reddit, and Delicious. You can scroll through these and open them up in new tabs, or pick from one of the tags SimilarWeb believes to be related to that page. This will pull up an entirely new list of places it thinks you should visit.
What makes the service shine is that users can re-arrange the lists and submit new sites that are not yet in SimilarWeb's index. There are thumbs up and down buttons which can raise or lower a site's standing on the list. Down-voting any site will actually remove it from the list. As a result, if users continue to vote the list gets more accurate.
SimilarWeb tells you sites that are like the one you're on.
(Credit: CNET Networks)There is a notable downside to using this extension: your browsing performance will take a hit. For some reason it needs to load its own results before it loads the actual page, which in my case meant waiting an extra few seconds when visiting a new site. That might be a deal killer for some, although it can easily be avoided by learning the keyboard shortcut that dismisses it from running in the sidebar. You can also pull up the results from a drop down menu next to your browser's address bar.
SimilarWeb would make a good companion for the now toolbar-free StumbleUpon, which actually learns from your browsing habits to give you pages it thinks you'll like. Combined with this you'd get another avenue of exploration.
Here's an explanatory video from the site's about page. Worth noting is that you don't need to have your volume on.
SimilarWeb 3 from Similar on Vimeo.
StumbleUpon wears a lot of hats: random Web site surfer, social networker, social bookmarker, site reviewer. It's a powerful little add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer.
One click is all it takes to get going with this toolbar, which encourages random discovery on the Internet based on your interests. The "Stumble!" logo whips you around the Net, but at the your pace, based on categories you choose during installation. Hundreds of topics are available and can be updated at will, with no selection limit. Other StumbleUpon functions are just as user-friendly. A click on the toolbar's "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" icons make ratings a cinch, and another click is all it takes to share sites, to update the friends list, to view the rated pages list, to read reviews of the page, to peruse the menu, or to search the StumbleUpon database.
Newer features make it easier to block sites and topics that you never want to stumble across, for the first time or ever again. Occasional use pops up a proprietary nagging page asking to complete your profile if you haven't; StumbleUpon pushes the social aspect pretty hard although it's easy enough to ignore. If Web surfing is the new channel surfing, then StumbleUpon should be your remote.
Music search and recommendation tool Mufin is opening to everyone this morning. The service, which launched in private beta in early October, lets you find music that's similar to a track you know based on a scientific analysis of its composition.
New on Thursday is both a Facebook app and the previously mentioned iTunes plug-in that scans your library to give you recommendations. Unlike Apple's "Genius" analyzer system in iTunes, Mufin actually scans your tracks for relational relevance instead of giving you an aggregate hodge-podge of recommendations based on the playlists and purchases of iTunes users. The only catch here is that you're limited to Mufin's relatively small 4 million-song database, which is roughly half that of iTunes.
Users are also getting the option to save playlists and notes--the service's equivalent to a shopping list. Previously these would disappear between sessions, which kept it from doubling as an ad-hoc music streaming tool.
As for the Facebook application, it's little more than a widget that lets you search for tracks without leaving the social network. It does however give you a "discovery wall," which lets you share and view tracks bookmarked by friends--similar to the MySpace version that was available back at launch. If you're looking for something a little more anonymous, the Mufin team is now providing weekly recommendations for music to look out for, although you'll have to purchase them off-site.
Previously: Mufin lets you discover new music with science
Note: The iTunes plug-in is currently Windows-only. You can download it here (.EXE warning). Here's what it looks like:
The new iTunes plug-in scans your library and offers up song recommendations based on musical similarities. (click to enlarge)
(Credit: Mufin )
On Tuesday night StumbleUpon is changing the way users interact with the service, ditching the need for a software-based browser toolbar in place of a small frame that loads on top of the Web site you're on. Users with the toolbar installed will still be getting the same experience, but the idea is that anyone can begin stumbling without having to install anything.
To get the Web toolbar to show up in the first place, users must now begin their stumbling experience from the StumbleUpon home page. The site is now broken up into categories. Once you've clicked on a link the experience begins, with the persistent toolbar following you from site to site and keeping track of your ratings to provide you with new stumbles.
Earlier this week, StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp told me this was an idea that had been kicked around the office for years--six in fact, and the only reason it hadn't happened sooner is that Camp and others felt it would diminish the number of people who were populating the service with rated content. That number is still staggering, with more than 35,000 new URLs submitted every day by 6 million registered users. Camp hopes this new install and registration-free solution will make those numbers even larger, and improve some of the uptake as people get to try the service without that first hurdle.
In addition to its exploratory angle, StumbleUpon is introducing a new partner program. Sites that have StumbleUpon installed will be able to offer their users a new "Stumble This" button with a counter on it. When a user clicks this it adds to the number, which can help promote it for other StumbleUpon members. It's also got an option right underneath the counter that lets users jump to another piece of related content, something Camp says should drive traffic to other existing posts. It's worth noting this is different from the previously existing StumbleThru feature, which would do this randomly.
StumbleUpon's new home page will serve as a starting point to various bits of media, and exploring it no longer requires a software toolbar. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: StumbleUpon)The partner program is launching on four sites Tuesday night, including political blogging network The Huffington Post, HowStuffWorks, Rolling Stone online, and National Geographic. Of the four, Rolling Stone and National Geographic are the most interesting, as users will be able to explore the photo archives with the service's recommendation engine. Like service Photoree, which we checked out back in August, this can be a fun and engaging experience.
Camp says there are 10 other partnerships in the works, including several for video and music content. Eventually the system will be open for anyone to place it on their blog, although Camp says the system needs to be fine-tuned before it's ready for that.
The future of StumbleUpon
When I asked Camp for comment on the rumored sale of StumbleUpon from parent company eBay, he said he "couldn't talk about any rumors." However, what's interesting is that this new system could be ported over to eBay, or any other product site, which is something many were expecting when the company was acquired last year. "This does open us up," he said. "We're a lot more media focused, and this would allow us to do product discovery."
Presumably with such a system in place you could jump around the site and discover new products while rating them at the same time--something the auction site does not currently provide. Camp says StumbleUpon might one day provide that, but for now he says that realm has already been covered pretty well by search. "(We're) more interested in doing media stuff. There's a greater need for discovery than products right now."
The new StumbleUpon.com should be available right now. Camp says user profiles, reviews, and friends lists will get updated to match the new style in the coming weeks.
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The MyDJ sidebar lets you autogenerate playlists without leaving iTunes.
Late Monday afternoon, music recommendation engine MusicIP released a beta of its MyDJ iTunes plug-in for Windows (available as a free download from the company site). I've spent the last few hours playing with the plug-in, and thus far I'm impressed. Like the company's standalone program, MusicIP Mixer 1.6, the MyDJ iTunes plug-in scans and analyzes your music library to ferret out similar songs and artists. But the standalone software requires you to organize music in MusicIP, then export the playlist to your media player software. The plug-in lets you automatically generate playlists without leaving iTunes.
Downloading and installing MyDJ was easy, and after the program conducted a basic analysis of my library I was ready to build my first playlist. (The "extended" analysis takes a bit longer; more on that below.) In iTunes I clicked on a track from my current musical obsession, The Helio Sequence, then moved to the MusicIP sidebar on the right-hand side of the screen. From there I could designate the length of my playlist--based on number of songs, length of time, or file size--and decide whether I wanted the list to favor the style of the song, the style of the artist, or a balance of the two. The plug-in also let me dictate the degree to which the mix matched my selected song, on a scale from zero ("tightly focused") to nine ("very diverse"). Clicking on "Make Playlist" almost instantly generated a playlist inside of iTunes. As an avid consumer of the free mp3s from CNET Download.com Music, I was thrilled to see that MyDJ had called up some really great tracks that were hidden deep in my iTunes library.
The sidebar also includes a window labeled "Similar to the selected track," which lists a handful of free tunes that match your song's profile. You can click on a song to give it a listen and, if you like it, click one button to download it and add it to your library. This feature has potential to be amazing, but at this point the catalog of discoverable music seems a bit thin. It offered up the same recommendations for several dissimilar songs, and sometimes none of the recommended tracks seemed like a decent match. The more distinctive the song, of course, the more relevant the recommendations: my southern-fried alt-country tunes achieved more appealing matches than generic-sounding indie rock.
Being a beta release, MyDJ for iTunes does have a few quirks. My biggest complaint lies with the user interface, which right now just sits on top of the right side of your iTunes window. There's currently no option to independently move or even resize the sidebar; instead you're forced to resize your iTunes window to leave room for MusicIP. I'd prefer to have a few display options, including placing the control panel at the bottom of the window, in lieu of the iTunes MiniStore. Also, Mac users are left out for now, though the company does plan to release an Mac OS X version "in the near future."
A final note of caution: the program's "extended analysis" of music files, which presumably would bring even more accurate recommendations, definitely eats up some CPU cycles. I was glad the program let me choose among Low, Normal, or High CPU usage in the Preferences, but even the Normal level completely monopolized the ancient 1.5GHz Pentium 4 machine that I use as my music server. Those with poky processors or large music collections will likely want to run the analysis overnight. I plan to do just that and will update this post in the morning with any new insights.
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