Social Media

RecommendationBox Should Take My Advice: Open Up!


is a very closed site for offering private recommendations to select friends, and requesting recommendations from your personal network. I know that there are a lot of sites out there that aim to provide a recommendation tool for various media types, and most of them are a bit more open-ended. I can go to and find recommendations based on the behavior of other users with tastes similar to mine.

The thing is, not many of those users know me, and won't be giving me a personalized recommendation based on our similar tastes as well as the fact that they know me. While this isn't necessarily a problem, it is a concept that seems to be attracting the attention of a number of developers out there including sites like shouldi. Now that we've gotten the quantity of recommendation sites out there, it's time to focus on the quality.

I'm all for quality, but let's take a look at how RecommendationBox is hoping to offer up a better solution to personalized recommendations.


What you do is give recommendations for various media (your category and subcategory are limited to the items listed in RecommendationBox's dropdown boxes), indicating the name of the product/service, and why you're recommending it. Then you decide who to send it to, whether it be your existing friends on RecommendationBox, or your existing friends via email. Requesting a recommendation works the same way. All items can be broadcast to all your existing friends on RecommendationBox, or kept to a select few.

I emphasize the fact that these items are shared with existing friends on RecommendationBox because the only people you're able to network with are those you've invited or that have invited you. There's no larger network to which you can offer your recommendations, and there's no search capability for seeing what others have recommended. There's not even a search capability for your own closed network's recommendations. The result is a highly closed circuit system.

As much as people would like to get as personalized as possible, by looking to their trusted network, asking for such a huge time commitment from users as well as limiting recommendations to pre-existing friends is more detrimental than anything, making RecommendationBox little more than an extension of an email blast feature. The great thing about a recommendation tool such as those found on is that they're able to learn from a very large pool of data in order to offer something new.

And even those that would like to better leverage your personal network for recommendation purposes are finding easier, more automated ways in which to do so, based on importing existing activity from other networks or learning from your behavior. Delver, for example, still keep things more private and personal without asking the users to do much more work within their social media applications.

Despite the basic current RecommendationBox offerings, however, there is some integration with Amazon and Google local APIs, with plans for a filtered recommendation search engine, so we'll see in which direction RecommendationBox will eventually end up.

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