Recently launched start-up Likaholix was actually developed by two wonderful Google employees, Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan. Previously, Bindu was a Group Product Manager at Google whereas fellow colleague, Arvind was a Senior Staff Engineer at Google.
What Likaholix does is that it complies all the interesting stuff such as book, movies, TV shows and products which it thinks that most users would like to search for on the Web and stores them in a database. Dubbed as a “fun and easy way to share and discuss your likes and discover new ones with people you know”, users will be presented with recommendations in reutrn of what they like when they input in a query. Likeaholix has some features which really make it a better and more user-friendly platform or probably you can even call it a “social” platform.
Similar to the Google and Yahoo search engines, it offers an auto-suggestion feature which enables you to find what you really want quickly and with ease. To boost social interaction, Likeaholix acts like a discussing platform whereby members can comment, vote and bookmark your friends’ likes. The best feature got to be the interactive profile that showcases all your likes on your mylikes page and they are arranged based on categories.
Just like Gmail, Google Groups and Google Maps, this platform uses Python as a technology tool for their crawls, data analysis and some backend servers. Also, it grabs data and information from social database – Freebase, and online encyclopedia – Wikipedia.
I’ve not tried out this service yet (I’m going to soon) but I’m sure that it’ll be quite “addictive” like my active presence on Twitter. This is because it provides a comprehensive number of features (especially the personalized social profile) that allows it to emerge from just a simple platform which gives recommendations of what users like to a social, discussing and interactive platform. Currently, Likaholix is in private beta and only limits 3000 invites. It seems like it’s gaining popularity since there are already 2500 people who have signed up for an account.