Like.com has to be the beginnings of the perfect tool for the Veruca Salt of shoppers. I had to do some research this morning using defacto standard search and I found about 344,000″ results returned. While these results would be great if I could get some click monkeys to take some time to look at actual search results, it is not the case.
Like helps narrow down the search for someone with aesthetics in mind first, then features. Months ago I uploaded my photo collection into Like’s parent company’s, Riya.com, facial recognition photosharing site. The results were impressive for an AI (and equal to asking my 2 year old niece to sort my photos).
This time around in my nonscientific test, the image recognition has improved to help shoppers, but not to the level of helpfulness as the attractive sales lady at Nordstrom. This is Like’s initial target audience (jewelry, handbags, shoes and watches….not me!)
Like has done some things here that I have yet to see matched anywhere on the web, such as being able to hone in on specific attributes of a picture and find other similar items. This is how to bring shopping to more visual, less tech savvy people. This is the first shopping search engine I can see my mom using (she agreed to the first “bondi blue” iMac because it matched the wallpaper).
While a tag cloud may make perfect sense to the Web 2.0 crowd, it’s meaningless to the masses and it really seems like a stopgap for true visual search. Like.com did seem a bit sluggish on my midrange computer but it is definitely usable and I would recommend it to all compulsive shoppers. Watch these guys closely, I think they’ll be making more splashes in the search pool but it may only be a matter of time before the G makes a similar feature.
The AJAX start page is old news….pageflakes, netvibes, Google IG, live.com….it’s been done. Yourminis.com is the first Flash startpage I’ve run across and it’s really cool…but I’ll never use it (edit: In the current form).
Yourminis.com (from the Goowy.com team) takes fractionally longer to load in my completely nonscientific method of looking at the counter in Winamp. Once loaded the first thing I noticed was the color and the motion. I feel like I stumped into the state fair after a few drinks. There is a lot going on the here. Just like any startpage, you can add tabs across the top to sort your “minis” which can be picked from the left column.
There are plenty of video minis to feed you the latest from youtube and the likes, as well as rss, webmail, flickr, podcasts and etc. The whole things comes together very well and allows you to view some external content inside the Yourminis site, which isn’t an entirely new thing but a nice implementation regardless.
Overall the whole interface is very fluid, but I just don’t feel “hooked”. Maybe flash is overkill for a startpage or just that I don’t see anything “new” here to take me away from my trusty old AJAX startpage. Call me old fashion, but I need a little foreplay before getting into all the crazy web 2.0 action.
For my first post I broke my own rules. I woke up today to the news that Microsoft unleashed the me too of 3D mapping software. I was impressed with the bird’s eyeview of Virtual Earth, so I was curious to see how things would go over. My initial plan for this site was to not invest more than a couple minutes into any product review, since that is how first impressions are formed.
I navigated to local.live.com to get a pleasant message that I can leave my Firefox at the door. Repeat again with IE6.0 and I am downloading… A few minutes into my “3D” experience, I was watching an exciting progress bar progress excitingly slowly. Not only did I get to experience the 3D painfully slow progress bar, I got 2 for the price of 1 with my .NET 2.0 installation!
Fastforward 12 minutes later and I am back to local.live.com and ready for some hardcore 3D action of my apartment in San Francisco. Unlike Google’s offering, VE3D lives in IE ( I should mention that the link provided by clicking the logo in the top left of live.com does not work at the time of my test).
