Noovo is a full-on lifestreaming / blogging / bookmarking / everything (except social network) app that launched out of private beta last week. It calls itself a “social discovery engine”; and recommendations technology is part of the overall package. The company Noovo is based in Slovenia, has been around for a long time and counts Esther Dyson amongst its investors. It took us a while to grok the service, but essentially Noovo is a content sharing application similar to Tumblr – but a lot more full-featured. In particular, as well as enabling you to aggregate and add content – as Tumblr does – Noovo lets you discover new content via automated recommendations.
Recommendations
In a tweet, the Noovo team told us that the app uses “state-of-the art deep graph mining and text extraction to recommend relevant content to users.” A recent blog post explained further that Noovo uses “advanced algorithms to filter out the noise for you and recommends you the most relevant stories based on who your influencers are”.
Further, Noovo recently deployed integration with dbpedia, the structured data version of Wikipedia. Noovo stated in its blog that this enables item-based recommendations, in other words pulling out topics from your user behaviour and that of your social network.
In many ways the recommendations part is like Digg‘s feature of the same name, in that it recommends interesting content from the site’s community that you may like. And the more you use Noovo, the better the recommendations supposedly become.
Features Galore
Noovo is an interesting app and it sports a visually appealing interface. However, some of the main features are hard to find and then understand when first getting started. For example we had to hunt around to find out where the recommendations are (on the oddly named ‘Cover’ page, as it happens), and the hour glass icon is confusing at first glance (when you click it, it shows how the recommendations came about).
Adding content can also be cumbersome, unlike Tumblr where it is very simple and intuitive.
It’s fair to say that these issues arise because Noovo has so many features – one could argue too many. But that also may end up its strength, because if you’re looking for a central place to aggregate, share and discover cool content on the Web – Noovo could be a great choice for you. The community is small right now, but there is no shortage of colorful content to browse. Check out Noovo CTO Matej Pangerc’s page, for example – you can see straight away that Noovo is very akin to Tumblr, Soup.io (my personal favorite) and other lifestreaming blog platforms.
We’ll be keeping an eye on Noovo and testing it out some more. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
