this whoisi feature is brought to you by joe shaw

July 22, 2008 in whoisi | 8 comments

My good friend Joe did some coding for whoisi a few weeks ago and I finally got around to merging it into the production code base. He’s added a really handy little feature: recommendations.



If you’re following a few people on the site and you’re looking for other people who might be related to them, the recommendation feature tries to make a guess based on other followers of the same people. In order to get the best out of the feature you need to be following people that have been on the site for a while and might be followed by other people. It uses other people’s following habits as the basis for recommendations so in this sense it’s pretty similar to the way that Netflix’s recommendation system works. (Although I’m sure the actual algorithm is very different.)

It should be fun – try it out and thank Joe if you see him!

  1. Paul Cutler’s avatar

    Paul Cutler on July 22, 2008 at 10:32 pm

    I guess the question is now, are you following your recommendations? :)

    Thanks for the shout out!

  2. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on July 22, 2008 at 10:50 pm

    Yeah, the recommendations feature found some people I didn’t know were listed. It totally helped me.

  4. greggles’s avatar

    greggles on July 22, 2008 at 11:19 pm

    Hi.

    I read this through planet mozilla. I’d rather that planet mozilla only include mozilla topics. Announcing Whoisi once was OK. But blogging about so many changes is a little overboard.

    Thanks,
    Greg

  5. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on July 22, 2008 at 11:20 pm

    I thought that planet mozilla only carried my mozilla-related topics. I guess not.

  6. Ploum’s avatar

    Ploum on July 23, 2008 at 2:54 am

    I’m totally fan of whoisi.com !

    Features I miss :

    1) A easily accessible list of supported URL/webservices

    2) A silly feature that tell you how many people are following a given name.

  7. Ploum’s avatar

    Ploum on July 23, 2008 at 3:02 am

    Another 2 features I would like to see :

    3) Search people by URL. If I enter an already recorded URL (Say a blog RSS feed), ut should tell me that this URL belongs to the person XXX. (but it might worth to still be able to create a new person. Some people share the same blog).

    4) Put the favicon of a given RSS feed next to him as for other services.

    I really like Whoisi, it’s incredibly good and I don’t have to convince my friends to use it like you should do for twitter/facebook/….

  8. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on July 23, 2008 at 10:25 am

    Most of those features are on the drawing books. Thanks!