I attended TechCrunch 9 at August Capital last Friday. There were a lot of VC's and startups there doing the Silicon Valley dance. The startups had plenty of interesting concepts however, I was disappointed that there was not much in the way of new or exciting user interfaces.
Perhaps the most interesting user experience on display was from a startup called AdaptiveBlue. They have a recommendation plugin for FireFox. The concept is not particularly novel - while you are on a product page, you can tag an item and share your tags across sites with others. The thing I liked about it was that they use a popover layer to interact with the user. When the user visits a product page that they want to tag, they click the AdaptiveBlue toolbar button and their dialog appears. This is the use of lightweight interactions made possible by DHTML that we are seeing appear across many sites. AdaptiveBlue's implementation of their service does not take the user away from their primary focus, the product page. They let the user stay in context and as a result smoothly fit their tagging process into the user's shopping activity.
Perhaps the most interesting user experience on display was from a startup called AdaptiveBlue. They have a recommendation plugin for FireFox. The concept is not particularly novel - while you are on a product page, you can tag an item and share your tags across sites with others. The thing I liked about it was that they use a popover layer to interact with the user. When the user visits a product page that they want to tag, they click the AdaptiveBlue toolbar button and their dialog appears. This is the use of lightweight interactions made possible by DHTML that we are seeing appear across many sites. AdaptiveBlue's implementation of their service does not take the user away from their primary focus, the product page. They let the user stay in context and as a result smoothly fit their tagging process into the user's shopping activity.Labels: lightweight, recommendations, tags
posted by Shawn Elson on Sunday, July 29, 2007
This little project suggests big things. Some folks built a 
I am fascinated by recommendation systems. I think they harness the power of the Net and communities in a powerful and useful way. So when I see a device like this, it makes me think about how recommendation systems can be extended beyond the computer.
