attap, an innovative company with potential to be a favorite of mine, has launched a fun enhancement to their buzzvote service that allows anyone to easily create and host visually appealing polls for product recommendations. Gone are the boring polls or product specific ratings with difficult comparison functionality; with BuzzVote you can display a poll for multiple products and allow users to give an easy thumbs up or thumbs down while displaying the results alongside one another for clear comparison.
(I considered a poll comparing Matt Cutts, Jeremy Zawodny, and myself but didn’t want to bruise any ego’s)
Unfortunately, the system is flawed in that the poll you create is only as good as the votes collected through your poll. attap has another time wasting (yet worthy) site at riffs.com that allows you to vote the same way on just about anything, creating a massive database of your likes and dislikes against which they then offer suggestions customized to your preferences. Through riffs, you can vote on people, music, books, technology, news, places, or even websites. Clearly, attap has collected previous votes for products which should be made available to the pollster; giving us an option to include those votes in a poll could add to the quality and depth of the poll results.
Both services are fun, innovative, and aestetically appealing but I hear you, how can I say this company has the potential to be one of my favorites with mere recommendation engines??
“Potential” is the keyword as forever languishing in closed development is lifeio, a product selected as the Top Connected Innovator of 2006 by TechCrunch. Perhaps this is a better link explaining lifeio for, as you can see from their website, they don’t even explain what it is. As I write this, I have no confirmation that lifeio will ever even see the light of day but I hope it does. All Things To All People (attap) is exactly what lifeio hopes to become by combining calendars, address books, to do lists, and more with riffs’ recommendation engine.
- Have a meeting coming up in San Francisco around lunch time? Knowing that lifeio could display restaurant recommendations based on your previous preferences
- View the calendars of friends and peers the same way you might be able to do with your corporate calendar system to easily book meetings, parties, and happy hour
- Heck, conceivably, it could merge the movie votes from you and your wife to recommend something you’ll both enjoy when it knows you have a date planned
